It seems much easier to find examples of the first two than the last two, really. I've been programming now for 30 years. Here are just ten of the major improve

It seems much easier to find examples of the first two than the last two, really. I've been programming now for 30 years. Here are just ten of the major improvements the industry made to software reliability in that time, on its own, without government intervention of any kind: 1. Unit testing. 2. Garbage collection (no more use-after-free bugs). 3. Stronger type systems. 4. Then stronger type systems with usability close to that of dynamic type systems. 5. Widespread usage of encryption, signing and sandboxing (hacking being a subset of "stuff that makes software unreliable"). 6. Exceptions with useful stack traces, that in some cases can be caught allowing the program to proceed. For example, my IDE doesn't totally die if a plugin hits an assertion whilst analyzing code, it just means that plugin doesn't get to contribute to my editor session. 7. Tightly specified memory models like the JMM. 8. Excellent monitoring platforms. 9. State machine replication like Raft, allowing for entire datacenter outages to be made nearly invisible to end users. Result: Google servers are now more reliable than the internet itself. 10. Ultra-stable operating systems like Linux. In 1995 the most popular OS couldn't manage an uptime of more than ~45 days. Today you can hotpatch the kernel without a reboot. There are loads more like this. Software today is drastically more reliable than it once was. Meanwhile, what has the government done? I'm trying to think of some, but they've all been failures or actually made things worse. In the security realm, we can thank governments for things like FIPS cryptography, which is hardly relevant outside places where it's mandated because it takes so long to approve what are clearly upgrades. Governments can't even get reliable software out of their own contractors - they're in no position to lecture others on how to do it right when they can't even get their own house in order. But it's not enough to only consider what governments do for reliability. We must also consider what they do against it. There unfortunately the karmic balance is deeply in the red, because governments routinely stockpile exploits then lose control of them, undermine cryptographic standards and so on. They actually like software being unreliable because they see bugs as weapons. A big part of Google's Project Zero is about imposing software reliability against the will of governments.