Posts by fg_swe

Core-JS chief complains open source is broken, no one will pay for it

QT Business Success

Maybe QT can be an inspiration for the future of Open Source ?

Impressive Numbers:

https://www.qt.io/group

Bingo

One way to fix Denis' income problem is to put his great work on the CV and apply for a job where his skills can be used. Lots of software engineers do this, myself included.

On the other hand, he could simply turn to the Qt business model and demand payment for all bug fixes and new releases. Maybe that would work, too.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

"Always"

The semiconductor industry is

a) dependent on government finance+subsidies (at least at the current growth rate)

b) prone to over-investment by governments and other players

If you know that, you will also know that there are heavy business cycles in this industry. Only invest in semiconductors if you are in for the long run (6 years at least). This is not my opinion, but that of many industry experts.

Also, theory says you should not over-expose yourself to one industry. Have John Deere, Airbus, BASF, Rolls Royce(and similar) in your portfolio, too.

Dollar vs Gold

Look here https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html, switch to "all data".

Then see why folks find BTC attractive, Mr BigMoney.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Turn Windows Into Unix

I find the Cygwin toolkit a very useful extension of Windows

http://cygwin.org/

It gives me much of the power of Unix on Windows:

perl, wc, egrep, wc, sed, vim, ctags, ls, sed, gcc, make and so on.

Much more powerful than the simpleton cmd shell of Windows. No need to learn powershell.

Many(most?) Unix programs can be run nicely on cygwin, including many which need an X11 server.

iOS

Indeed iOS is a golden cage, but if you can spring it free (as some people apparently did in the past), it is very much a "little" Unix machine.

Eg. these Unix APPs

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ftpmanager-ftp-sftp-client/id525959186

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ftp-server/id346724641

They Wish

Good Old HTML is very much alive. It can be read using NetSurf and other little browsers.

Mind you, it is called World Wide Web, not Elite Controlled Mainframe.

Run your own little server behind your DSL modem and be free from the whims of the oligarchy.

Wife

Also see "Weib" in German, which is very close to Wife. For some reason "Weib" is now derogatory here (Suebi land), but that is a very recent development. So we now use "Frau".

"weiblich" still means "female" and is not derogatory. Well, maybe already on the left coast, they apparently want to cancel Mutter/Mother.

I do think we use too many latin terms already(in English much worse than in German) and that is why I prefer "men" over "human".

Rust vs Ada

I assume most people know the C/Java/C#/C++ Syntax(curly braces and all that) and Rust *looks* closer to what they know, as compared to Ada syntax.

Semantically, Spark Ada definitely looks very interesting.

I am not an Ada guy, but found this: https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memory-Management-in-Ada-and-SPARK.pdf

Please also look here for a POSIX compliant OS in Ada: https://marte.unican.es/

The short answer is that Rust is safer than traditional Ada. They did not have safe heap deallocation.

Indeed

From my experience with memory-safe languages I can support "Applications written in it are unequivocally stable". The undefined behaviour of the C and C++ languages has real-world effects such as mysterious crashes and other mysterious "behaviour". Memory safety brings real improvements in terms of reliability, safety and security.

Apparently, each true and factual statement gets some heavy downvoting here. I now take it as a badge of honor to get heavy downvoting.

Not Missing Windows Either

I use Linux and MacOS. The latter is a Unix with very nice GUI, ergonomics and comes with a nice Apple office package. Compilers I can get from brew and the bash command line feels like any other Unix.

OpenOffice and Linux in general does not look as polished, but certainly does the job, too.

Buy a Linux computer from a Linux vendor, if you don't want to spend many hours driver-hunting/compiling.

Only the business folks *think* that they need Windows+Office.

Also: Modern Day Unix

MacOS X: very nice Unix system (from mechanics to GUI) running on top of superfast/superefficient ARM cpu.

iOS: locked-down Unix.

Android: locked-down Unix.

OpenBSD, FreeBSD: important players in several applications, some of them of strategic relevance.

For better or worse, Unix dominates the computing world. Also, it is much more than the Linux kernel.

Still Is

MacOS, iOS, Android, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.

If Linus turns nuts tomorrow, we will simply switch to them.

Well

It is good to know how to systemically fix the challenges of Big Kernels.

Men

I was told that "man" and "men" has always been used as "Mensch" in German. If that offends COMINTERN tools, even better.

Technology & Economics

1.) The Linux kernel can be stripped much smaller than the WNT kernel, as the latter has graphics, font rendering and several networking stacks baked-in. Mind you: a single kernel exploit is Game Over.

2.) Windows has automated a limited number of tasks with user-friendly GUIs. As soon as you need advanced things or if you want to automate/mass operations: same effort as Linux command line. Capable Windows Admins are not cheaper than Linux Admins, as they all must be semi-programmers using bash, perl, python or PowerShell.

3.) The men running AWS or Google Cloud must be true experts, their economy comes from the scale of their operations.

4.) If you want to see the future of OSs, look at minimalist microkernels:

https://sel4.systems/

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/L4gegenueberLinux.html

(Maybe it is not fair to compare L4 to Linux at the moment, but in the future it could be like the picture)

https://github.com/AmbiML/sparrow-manifest

Like a warship, seL4 can take hits in base modules, and still be overall secure.

China reportedly producing quantum computers – good luck observing one

Rudolf Diesel

This man devoted his life to get this type of engine running reliably. Before that, he tortured his mind to get the required education to understand thermodynamic engines.

Only greedy people can be mad at Rudolf and his people.

So ?

Lazy people hate the hard-working, hard-learning ?

You are free to stop using the inventions of Europeans. Have fun with the horse carriage and don't use any food from artificial

fertilizer(invented by the bad, bad Kaiser Wilhelm Institute). That would be "cultural appropriation". Also, have fun with the Abacus, as Zuse and Turing invented the digital computer.

Likewise, transistors are the evil work of the white men of AT&T. You can always use Smoke Signs, but never with digital signaling. Don't appropriate the work of Boole !

And when you hurt yourself, don't dare to use Penicillin.

US Neighbours

Both Canada and Mexico are on very friendly terms with the U.S. Strong economic partnership. There has been belligerence with latin America decades ago and it yielded not many good relations.

Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are the exception from the rule. And all of them suffer from HUNGER, as far as I can fathom here. Communism at its worst.

Granted, there are loads of lazy and entitled commies throughout latin America, but most nations have very good relations with America. Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and many small ones.

"Tough Nut"

Your assumption just shows the lack of people skills of computer folks like us. Do you really think the British, the Americans, the Germans will send a Bond-style white guy to China ? Complete with an shiny Aston-Martin and a $30000 Rolex ?

No, they will recruit a Chinese engineer/scientist working in South Korea or Japan. This man will travel between mainland and SK or JP on a regular basis. He can bring the goods with him on a Flash chip stuck into his gumshoes. Also, the guy will look like a moderately well-off Chinese man, just like engineers do.

Now, that's my imagination, the Oxford-educated and SIS-trained officers of SIS have much better knowledge how to do this. They robbed the Russians blind, they will do the same with China.

Japan, Netherlands reportedly join US in China tech export ban

Solar Cells, Dirty Coal

China dominates several industries, because they now burn 30% of the earth's total annual coal consumption. Coal is cheap energy, which you need for many processes, including the refinement of silicon. Solar cells need lots of silicon, so China is the "natural" king of solar cells. For some reasons, the west's Greenies never complain about communist CO2 emissions.

As I wrote before, Mao is proud of how he could mess with other nation's minds.

Ukraine

It's all a great tragedy, brothers killing brothers. And a competition of two power centers, the Russian and the English speaking power centers. With a bit of imagination you could say "two Viking powers duking it out".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

https://www.history.org.uk/primary/resource/3867/the-vikings-in-britain-a-brief-history

If the English and the Americans only knew how much they have in common with the Rus, maybe they could find a way to talk to each other and find a truce...

Covid Corruption

Indeed a big problem. Many people in the US, Germany, the UK and many other nations have been fighting this corruption. Check General Flynn, if you want a high profile antagonist.

In China, they locked up their people like cattle as part of the C thing.

If General Flynn were Chinese, he would have disappeared in a Gulag or worse.

Now, can you see the difference ? Fixable Corruption vs. Total Corruption.

I have been on the street protesting the craze, what have you done ?

Re: Well Done

Let's just call it a big misunderstanding. Your moral arguments have been lost when PUTIN brought arab migrants to the Polish Border and proceeded to threaten to burn down major cities.

We know your playbook.

Re: A Vital Expense for the Practical Supply of Virtually Nothing ..... Profit’s Big Brother

These corporations and their scientific basis only exist because of the rule of law, security and decency provided by the states they operate in. In communism, any independent thought will be destroyed by the secret police, if their paranoia deems it necessary.

See this

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Hartmann_(Physiker)#1965%E2%80%931974:_das_Mikroelektronik-Jahrzehnt

Essentially, the GDR leadership thought they could steal the designs of the west, without understanding of the technology. The rationality of robbers.

(Google Translate can give you an english version)

Technology and science is based on questions, honesty and independent thought.

If Russia and China want to become science and technology centers, they are free to dump their communist attitudes. They are free to value their best minds instead of killing, incarcerating and jailing them. Eventually, their own workers, technicians, engineers and scientists will give them a top notch semiconductor industry.

Well Done

Technology transfer fuels the arms race. Advanced arms might lead their owners to miscalculations. Our first objective should be to preserve the moderately peaceful situation we have. It could be much worse than "just" the Ukraine war.

In Ukraine, a negotiated solution should be found. See what RAND thinks

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html

Given the threats of nuclear war, considerations of free trade and "development" are clearly secondary.

Memory safety is the new black, fashionable and fit for any occasion

Way Too Reasonable

How can you dare to be so reasonable ? Do you have no compassionate feelings for all those angry C coders ?

"Crypto Protection"

You possibly think that your crypto layer protects the code which displays the plaintext (text, audio, video, HTML, GIF, whatever). This is a dangerous assumption, as one of your communication partners could be captured, be a mole or be hacked.

Then a properly ciphered data stream, containing an exploit, could enter your "display code".

I assume this is a theoretical threat for you, but this is not true for all users. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-boss-jeff-bezoss-phone-hacked-by-saudi-crown-prince

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Thilo_Schmidt

Mysterious

"real problems lie in thread / hardware module interactions"

I have been using pthread threads, mutexes, semaphores and never had such mysterious problems. Works nicely on SPARC, Intel x86, AMD x86, Apple M1, PowerPC, Elbrus, HP PA. OSs Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, xBSD, MacOS 11.

Can you post an example of your problems ?

Why C and C++ Cannot Be Memory Safe

I have written it down here:

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/WhyCandCppCannotBeMemorySafe.html

Re: Nuanced Approach

Maybe this particular setup is "secure" because "no potential attacker knows the email adresses".

Maybe not and the attacker will send a crafted message, which exploits a bug in your crypto endpoints. This will become likely, as soon as you have lots of users and one of them is hacked. And of course, if you are an interesting target. Finance, politics etc.

Why do you use gmail as the "router" ? Why not your own little TCP based router program ? That would cut google out of the picture. Whitelist the allowed IP addresses as a Defence In Depth.

Nuanced Approach

1.) Do not use C or C++ to implement internet-facing systems.

2.) If you need maximum performance in technical or scientific applications (e.g. Matrix Multiplication, FFT,...) and your input can be considered "safe", then C and C++ might still be the right languages. This becomes tricky, if your enemy could potentially fake a radar or sonar echo and expose your algorithm to this fake signal.

2.2) A Hybrid Approach of "C++ for low level signal processing" and "memory safe scanner, parser, validator, application logic" might be ideal.

High Security ?

Recently an exploitable bug in GNUpg was found. This bug could have exfiltrated the Secret Key of the attacked party. So it might indeed make sense to run programs under valgrind control.

Silent Subversion

The real threat are the undiscovered bugs, also in YOUR code, which will be exploited by a cybernetic attacker over the network or other channels. If the attacker is an expert, you and your users will never even notice the subversion.

E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/05/apple-iphone-pegasus-spyware-nso-group-israel-jordan

Ariane V, First Flight

At that time, HIL Tests were not a thing. The lack of HIL cost them the aircraft and the payload. Damage $500 000 000.

Re: Impossible

6.) No concept of enforcing the use of Smart Pointers. This results in lots of use-after-free and use-before-initialized errors. Most of them exploitable by cybernetic attackers.

Throwing C and C++ In One Basket

In terms of lacking Memory Safety, they have indeed similar or identicaly problems. Lots of "undefined" behaviour, which all create Memory Cancer and can typically be exploited by cybernetic attackers.

Inefficient Memory Safe C and C++ Programs

$ valgrind ./unsafe_c_program

This will resut in a memory safe program execution at a penalty of 100 times more runtime cost. But it will detect all memory errors. Due to the slow execution, some bugs will be completely masked and appear to not exist (especially the multithreading bugs). With Rust or Sappeur the penalty will be in the order to 1.5 to 5(e.g. matrix multiplication).

Impossible

"C++ people should strive to achieve memory safety ".

There are very basic reasons, why this cannot be achieved efficiently:

1.) No concept of thread-local and thread-global data in the type system. This creates inefficiencies (any smartpointer must be threadsafe ?) and dangerous race conditions, which can destroy the heap and thereby the entire process.

2.) No automatic detection of raw arrays, raw pointers or vector::operator[](). All of which is a potential memory bug.

3.) No concept of detecting "pointer in the heap pointing to the stack".

4.) No concept of avoiding crazy casts such as

int x;

RadarTrace* radarPtr = RadarTrace*(x);

5.) Not standard way of stopping a stack overflow before it damages other modules.

Wrong

Even the most educated, capable and seasoned software engineers are under economic pressure to "deliver something working". That implies bugs. Example: The widely used Yacc compiler generator had a bug, which resided for more than 30 years undetected. There is no such man as a "perfect software engineer", but only various levels of "fallible".

That includes core software components for embedded systems. It also includes Boeing Co, who killed 250 people in a rookie software conception mistake("737 MCAS").

FALSE

1.) All Turing-complete languages, including Rust, can be used to write a compiler for compiling the language itself. Has been done for Pascal, Algol and partially for Rust. Rust uses llvm because the optimizer and code generator of llvm is lots of work to reproduce in Rust.

2.) Many operating systems have been written in non-C languages. E.g. HP MPE (Pascal), ICL 2900 (Algol), Marte(Ada and some C), Oberon(Oberon), ASOS(Ada), Singularity(C#), RedoxOS(Rust).

3.) Ideally, as many parts as possible of a system are realized in strongly typed and memory safe languages. Many popular C based libraries were chock-full of exploitable bugs, including Pcre, OpenSSL, libpoppler, libwget, libcurl and many others.

4.) Finally, memory safety and strong typing are not a Silver Bullet. Software Engineers and Managers still need to have proper requirements, system architecture, scanners, parsers, proper object models and sufficient test cases from unit to system level. For reasons of "economics", testing is often insufficient to the extreme.

Thanks

"because humans are [very] fallible"

This is the key observation. Even the most seasoned and best-educated software engineers will create bugs then and now. It happened to VxWorks, HP-UX, Linux, Windows, Apache, all Office packages, Yacc, Pcre, Flash Player, all sorts of PDF readers, all types of web browsers. In embedded control units(from ABS to software-stabilized jets), bugs will be found in "expert engineer" code by means of static analyzers, unit tests, module tests and system tests. Human error is the norm and must be countered by technological and organizational measures.

Memory Safety and Strong Typing (as opposed to JS, PHP, Python) are two of the most powerful tools to limit and contain the damage from software engineer's error.

Finally, this is not a new observation, Tony HOARE and Niklaus WIRTH have been saying this for decades. Algol Mainframes from ICL/Fujitsu, Lebedev Institute and Unisys have been providing memory-safe execution environments for decades, but they were much pricier than Unix. The cheap approach "won".

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

Really ?

1.) If Mr Ellison is such a brute, how come all those corporations license his products ?

1.2) Why doesn't everybody just use PostgreSQL and Ruby ? Maybe these products cannot compete with a highly tuned RDBMS and a proper language with a high performance code generator ?

2.) At least Mr Ellison does not stray into business fields he has no clue of.

3.) I never heard of Mr Ellison forcing people at gunpoint to use his products. Why the hatred ?

4.) Why the hatred for a company which employs 132 000 people, many of them highly educared, skilled and well paid software engineers ?

Full disclosure: I never worked for Mr Ellison nor was I a Oracle specialist. I once developed a smallish Oracle database application. The thing worked, but was totally insecure. telnet oralistener 1521 and some random keypresses crashed the contraption.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

The Real Threat: WEF People

ChatGPT is a toy as compared to the real-world effects of the WEF alumni.

I am sheeding some light on this here, plus a counter-vision:

http://gauss.ddnss.de/AEF.html

Of course U2 is one of Bill Gates' favorite bands

In Other Words

All of my arguments are correct, as you can only deflect from them.

The King of "Vaccine Subscription"

The half baked stuff he sponsors "immunizes" you for three months, then you need another shot. Each shot a nice proft for the "philantropist".

Also, lets suppress all the reports of side effects, because this man is so insanely rich, he can't be a quack.

US think tank says China would probably lose if it tries to invade Taiwan

Russian Army Numbers

Russia has a population in the order of 140 millions. For simplicity we assume a similar age structure in NATO.

If they do all out conscription, then Ukraine and Poland don't have sufficient manpower. At least England and Germany would have to start conscription, too. Sweden and Finland will be happy to defend themselves.

Maybe this must be done, I dont have a crystal ball, either.

And this time we will not make an exception. Draft the journalists and bureaucrats first, they are typically the worst warmongers. Those who claim disabilities must serve in command centers/logistic centers/arms dumps, always ready to take a CM or ballistic hit. Age 18..60, no exceptions.

Escalation ?

Of course we could escalate:

1.) Take out critical infrastructure deep in Russia, using cruise missiles, stealth.

1.2) Sea blockade of Russia; serious sinking of Russian surface fleet. Submarines must be dealt with, too.

2.) Fight a nasty infantery/tank/missile war in Poland, Baltics

2.2) Conscript men in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada to get the required manpower vis a vis Russia's conscription

3.) Absorb quite a few cruise missile hits on London, Berlin, Warsaw and maybe even Paris.

In other words, not as convenient as our childish warmongers want it.

Do YOU want to be conscripted as a MILAN anti tank gunner ? We have would have 200 000 openings TOMORROW.