> They want to attack this company or this group of individuals. But someone who backdoors such a core piece of open source infrastructure wants to cast a wide net to attack as many as possible.
The stuxnet malware, which compromised Siemens industrial controls to attack specific centrifuges in uranium enrichment plants in Iran, is a counterexample to that.
Stuxnet wasn't similar to this xz backdoor. The Stuxnet creators researched (or acquired) four Windows zero-days, a relatively short-term endeavor. Whereas the xz backdoor was a long-term 2.5 years operation to slowly gain trust from Lasse Collin.
But, anyway, I'm sure we can find other counter-examples.
If a government wants to cast a wide nest and catch what they can, they'll just throw a tap in some IXP.
If a government went to this much effort to plant this vulnerability, they absolutely have targets in mind - just like they did when they went to the effort of researching (or acquiring) four separate Windows zero-days, combining them, and delivering them...
> And in general, the build system of a large project is doing a lot of work and is considered pretty uninteresting and obscure. Random CMake macros or shell scripts would be just as likely to host bad code.
Build systems can even have undefined behaviour in the C++ sense. For example Conan 2 has a whole page on that.
What could be a different case is Clojure. But I am not sure, and the performance characteristics of Clojure make it well-suited for server-style concurrency, but not so much for high-performance parallelism.
Is there something we can learn from these examples? Are there good reasons for these languages being adopted? And are the Racket designers with their approach of "a language to define interoperable DSLs" up to something?
I think programming languages are more like spoken languages than we give them credit for. Their design is more intentional, but the processes by which they spread, compete, and evolve is similarly difficult to pin down.
Isn't Rust really well suited as the main extension language of functional-preferring, strongly-dynamically-typed, interactive languages, such as Racket, Guile, OCaml, or F#?
I am thinking more and more it would be a pretty good idea to keep the place habitable where we are now. Besides other things, it is quite beautiful here.
Yeah definitions are tricky. If you saw a house consumed with fire, you might look at the circumstances and conclude that it was likely the offspring of the fire that consumed the house across the street, but there wouldn't be anything about the fire's phenotype that would help you come to that conclusion.
If the flames carried the characteristic shape of their parents fire, and they could be distinguished as not the offspring of some other fire by their features alone, then I'd be arguing that fire is alive.
I feel like I'm at risk of classifying certain periodic crystals as alive here, but they wouldn't meet the thermodynamic requirements that I have in mind (which fire does meet).
Most definitions of life are very arbitrary. When it comes to astrobiology, we mostly look for things that look like us because if we didn't, the search space would be incomprehensibly large and frankly there's not a lot we could say.
How we would call such depends how you define and understand life. If one defines it very widely as a dynamic dissipative process in an open thermodynamic system which organizes matter and energy, reacts to its surroundings, can reproduce itself, may have some symbolic representation of its surroundings, and possibly even care for its reproductions, intelligent life on a star is entirely possible, even if it would be very, very different from us.
If you on the other hand, define it as a set of dissipative structures which are based on organic carbon chemistry and which is able to exist somewhere between -30 and 40 degrees centigrade, replicates itself, use Deoxyribonucleic acid to store generational information, nourish their young by mammary glands, and walk on two legs, we are probably pretty alone in the universe.
Another things to think about, all life forms on our planet are relatives in the sense that we have common ancestors and shared DNA, even such "alien" creatures like tarantulas or centipedes. Given that, I am not entirely sure that it would be pleasant for us to meet technologically superior aliens. We would have to pray that they have much more empathy with other living things than we primates ourselves can usually muster.
"If you on the other hand, define it as a set of dissipative structures which are based on organic carbon chemistry and which is able to exist somewhere between -30 and 40 degrees centigrade, replicates itself, use Deoxyribonucleic acid to store generational information, nourish their young by mammary glands, and walk on two legs, we are probably pretty alone in the universe."
I have heard arguments that all life must be carbon based, and the temperature range is really a proxy argument for life requiring h2o. Everything after dna is clearly a joke.
The stuxnet malware, which compromised Siemens industrial controls to attack specific centrifuges in uranium enrichment plants in Iran, is a counterexample to that.