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jitl 2 days ago

People with Linux servers keep getting hacked so idk if I buy the argument “if it’s in use it’s good enough”. That’s like saying “everyone else runs Pentium 2, why would I upgrade to Pentium 3?”

cardanome 2 days ago | parent [-]

While memory safety can help reduce many security vulnerabilities it is not the only source of vulnerabilities. Furthermore as for getting hacked I would suspect the main problems to be social engineering, bad configuration and lack of maintenance and not really the software itself being insecure.

> That’s like saying “everyone else runs Pentium 2, why would I upgrade to Pentium 3?”

No one should blindly upgrade because bigger number is better. If I look into new hardware I research benchmarks and figure out if it would enable me to (better) run the software/games I care about it and if the improvement is worth my money.

Same with security. You need to read actual studies and figure out what the cost/benefit of certain measures is.

There are safer alternatives to Linux but apparently the situation isn't bad enough for people to switch to them.

And I am not saying you should create new projects in C or C++. Most people should not. But there is a lot of battle tested C and C++ code out there and to act as if we suddenly have this big problem with memory safety is a weird narrative to push. And if you discover a vulnerability, well fix it instead of wrapping it Fil-C and making the whole thing slower.