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Linus Torvalds on security: 'Do no harm, don't break users'

Charles 9

"It's a false dichotomy. The effort that goes into the break it now fix should go into the fix it properly fix. What I want, and which I expect Linus to provide, because of this approach, is a system that works and can be trusted."

But then you hit Trolley Problem territory where you CAN'T have both, because of stuff like true zero-day vulnerabilities which are UNKNOWN bugs that are being ACTIVELY exploited. You can't fix a bug you don't know about yet, yet you can't just let it lie, either. It's like police being tipped off to suspicious activity yet they don't investigate it as it considered too minor and then BOOM! The Las Vegas shooting and so on. There are times when one MUST err on the side of caution. So having the ABILITY to perform some kind of hardening is necessary as a kind of vigilance. I think the chief complaint is that there needs to be some more control of these features in case there's a situation where high availability happens to be more important.

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