<story><title>‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity</title><url>https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/-zero-click-hacks-by-nso-group-and-others-growing-in-popularity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>obblekk</author><text>Why don&amp;#x27;t Apple &amp;amp; Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities.&lt;p&gt;Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse&amp;#x2F;more frequent&amp;#x2F;harder to solve afterwards than others.&lt;p&gt;Better yet, why wasn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;rebuild commonly used standard libraries&amp;quot; in the US Infrastructure bill last year? The government could pay programmers a lot, and pay whitehat pen-testers a lot (+ per bug discovered) and in a few years of iteration, we&amp;#x27;d have incredibly hardened, durable software infrastructure that would benefit us for decades to come, in the public domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Natsu</author><text>Mostly because it&amp;#x27;s not clear that from-scratch rewrites produce better results.  They can if the entire architecture needs to be different, but for many libraries it just devolves into an exercise in bikeshedding.&lt;p&gt;This is particularly true of the US government which, if you&amp;#x27;ve seen their IT systems, is not going to be anyone sane&amp;#x27;s first choice for doing from-scratch rewrites.</text></comment>
<story><title>‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity</title><url>https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/-zero-click-hacks-by-nso-group-and-others-growing-in-popularity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>obblekk</author><text>Why don&amp;#x27;t Apple &amp;amp; Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities.&lt;p&gt;Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse&amp;#x2F;more frequent&amp;#x2F;harder to solve afterwards than others.&lt;p&gt;Better yet, why wasn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;rebuild commonly used standard libraries&amp;quot; in the US Infrastructure bill last year? The government could pay programmers a lot, and pay whitehat pen-testers a lot (+ per bug discovered) and in a few years of iteration, we&amp;#x27;d have incredibly hardened, durable software infrastructure that would benefit us for decades to come, in the public domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bo1024</author><text>I think to a large extent this is a mythical man-month thing. Beyond a small scale, you probably can&amp;#x27;t improve or speed up operating system design by throwing money and person count at it.</text></comment>