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This is a brilliant read. On cybersecurity: "One fundamental cause of cyber insecurity is core weaknesses in the architecture of most current computer systems
by christianbryant 11y ago
This is a brilliant read. On cybersecurity:
"One fundamental cause of cyber insecurity is core weaknesses in the architecture of most current computer systems that are, in effect, a historical legacy. These architectures have their roots in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when computers were roughly 10,000 times slower than today’s processors and had much smaller memories. At that time, nothing mattered as much as squeezing out a bit more performance and so enforcing certain key safety properties (having to do with the
way in which access to computer memory is controlled and the ability of operating systems to differentiate among different types of instructions) were deemed to be of lesser importance."
- Animats 11y agoNah. There were more secure operating systems in the late 1970s and 1980s: IBM VM, Wang's OS, KeyKos, Popek's kernel. Then came UC Berkeley.
- christianbryant 11y agoOk, you've got me with IBM VM :-) But, I understand what they are getting at. In fact, the GNU/Linux love I am, I actually subscribe to Jaron Lanier's view that we are too attached to our long-held ideas of what computers and operating systems need to be...
- MichaelGG 11y ago... This still holds true today and is one of the main reasons people are using things like C++. If performance was simply not an issue, far less people would try to avoid garbage collection, bounds checks everywhere, etc.