Have you been paying attention? People are glitching chips now to read private keys out of hardware wallets and to bypass secure boot signature checks. And if that's not possible, then you chip the device and bypass its primary boot loader. Even with the rise of strong crypto people still find weaknesses. Your assertion about strong crypto defeating man's ability to break software simply isn't true. You must be from the thin period of history around 2008 for about 10 years where pwning your device had been predominately done in software.

Regardless, you certainly have a warped perception of security. My OS not behaving as it should because someone forgot to remove a pointer from a ring buffer after its data was freed thus allowing malware to compromise my hardware and my personal information--possibly my livelihood--just so you can jailbreak your phone easier is so insanely idiotic it's beyond me. The right solution, if you care about owning your hardware, is to buy a device where you're allowed to replace the secure-boot keys with your own so that you can participate in the advances in security that we've made over time. Or pass a law that requires companies that sell hardware to provide boot loader unlock keys similar to what we did with SIM cards.

Also, java has been used for embedded, real-time, and system level stuff. The Android system notably, ran Java when it was born. And likely so does your bank card.

There are ways to have secure programming languages and secure boot and also own your hardware without yelling at the clouds and wishing them rain 2008 back down on you...

> "We are not truly free if we do not have the freedom to make mistakes."

We don't build bridges that fall down and declare that we've done it out of the need to preserve freedom to experience gravity.

Software engineering is an engineering profession and building reliable software that works as intended is the goal. It's never been the goal to build breakable software... It's been a side effect of decades of engineering compromises to make a product buildable with the tools and resources available at the time. Tools and resources are better now, and it's high time we stopped building things that make it easy for an attacker to steal from your grandmother by compromising her bank's website.

I can assure you that systems will still be hackable and I can assure you that if they aren't, it will be of value to somebody to build a flexible at-your-own-risk system from first principles. The vast, vast majority of humanity is best served by having tools that do what they are designed to do.

I would think that someday I would stop getting shocked by things I see on Hacker News, but the "We need to keep using c++ because buffer overrun attacks are good actually" mentality is a new one on me.

I once thought like that. That was before I realised that corporate interests and those of the user increasingly don't align, and that any strength on their side equates to strength against you.

There needs to be a balance. Any extreme is dystopia. I'm just pushing back because I want to restore that balance.

It may equate to strength against someone; that someone isn't me.

Hackers are a non-protected minority. And they're generally smart enough to think their way out of the world being made harder to hack. For the rest of us, most changes making the world harder to hack are improvements. That's one of the reasons the marketplace keeps rewarding such changes.

the idea that "making things 'more secure' is active hostility", is some grade A trolling, congratulations on that.