MSRC-Security-Research VS Killed by Google

You’ll find more primary sources across different organizations that all arrive at the 60 - 70% number. But what really grinds my gears here is that you take a piece from the article you’re criticizing and pretend that it’s a quote from Matt Miller.

It’s actually quite easy to find a primary source here because the slides from the talk that the article is based on are available: https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

To quote from those slides: „~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues“.

> It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare.

I don't think it's that bizarre. The two big headline features that bring Rust such popularity are: #1 "70% of bugs are memory-safety bugs" [1] and Rust can help solve those, and #2 C/C++ have a couple of package manager solutions - none of which have critical mass and Rust "comes with" cargo.

Those two make me really eager to continue experimenting with Rust.

> It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probably never will.

This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Windows is likely a big task for the same reasons as SMAP (https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...). XNU should be comparable to FreeBSD, which CheriBSD is a fork of, as both use Mach's VM for memory management and have a bunch of shared code in various places, but userspace is more of an unknown quite how much effort it'd be (you'll need to port Objective-C and, now, Swift, for example). For Chromium we have ported WebKit, so I'd imagine Blink isn't too dissimilar. V8 is likely interesting, though we have a version of WebKit's JSC JIT for Morello, which gives confidence in V8 being doable.

A related post from Google Security Blog[0]:

> "A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...

[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Here is some of the internal advocacy going on at Microsoft.

- Managed languages if you can afford a GC

- Rust

- C++ with Core Guidelines

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/tree/mas...

Note that there are still some teams like Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS, which are only providing C based SDKs, so no everyone is on the same wave length.

I was already starting to feel a little cornered in the whole Google ecosystem and a bit limited with stuff like backups, vendor lock in, etc. (and you always have the obvious hanging over your head) and ultimately, I think I just find the mental model of a SQL database more intuitive compared to a NoSQL database. So I thought to myself; "the longer I leave it, the harder it'll be to make the switch".

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Their reputation is deserved. Google domains was killed only last year!

And this isn't even the first time I've been burned by Google's decisions. If you're familiar at all with the Google Graveyard, you'll know that Google has a long history of killing off products and services that people have come to rely on. This has happened to me a number of times, in both a personal and professional capacity, and frankly it's getting old.

Just because Google has a couple of decent services that you're willing to pay for doesn't detract from the fact that most of their products have a worse life expectancy than a victorian child in the 1800s. https://killedbygoogle.com

They ruined every single opportunity to be more than an advertising company since Orkut. With scrapped attempts, starts and lack of intention for most of the 2010s to even during the early half of the Pixel Era, they seemingly haven't learnt to stick to something and iterate on it well.

And the fact that over 50% of their revenues come from search and by extension, advertising.

The fact' that til this day, they still haven't evolved from the "throwing shit at the wall then at the fan" strat which explains how they have fumbled so much so quickly.

Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go.

https://killedbygoogle.com

The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly power is a helluva drug.

To me Gemini is just sort of generic and uninteresting. There has to be hundreds or thousands of products and companies based on the name "Gemini" - "Bard" was at least interesting, different and distinct.

I've no idea about the quality of the product itself, I have never had a reason to use it. It's long past cliché now but I wouldn't get too attached to a Google product that is definitely costing a lot of money but which has no clear pathway to turning a profit. I think they will keep it ticking over until the hype train moves on from Chatbots/LLMs, and then it'll join the Google Graveyard @ https://killedbygoogle.com

We're not talking about reliability, we're talking about Google's penchant for killing established products that people use. https://killedbygoogle.com