Halvar Flake

I think we're disagreeing on what the central point is, then. I think least-privilege architectures are great, and I use them for many things. I think they do not save you from the problem being addressed in this article. That is, do not read what I'm saying as an argument against least-privilege architectures: read it as an argument against using that hammer to drive in this screw. In turn, I think that means that there isn't enough justification for using them in this case that users will feel like the additional complexity of wiring through least-privilege across their libraries is worth it. Even if you take the approach of incrementally adding the security to the existing design, the implication is it won't actually be securing end users for a long time, and only against minor and unlikely threats at first, but it will impose increasing complexity all along. See also this excellent post about mitigations: http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2020/03/before-you-ship-security-mitigat… KeyKOS is great and I've read about it and tried to adopt its lessons in my own designs, but the fact remains that KeyKOS is dead. And I certainly agree that a small performance overhead for guaranteed security properties shouldn't be seen as a tradeoff (assuming it is in fact solely a performance overhead, and not a developer mental burden, nor a reviewer mental burden, nor an operational burden) - but I'm not commenting on what I see, I'm commenting that the vast majority of NPM users…

> I wrote this the other day: >> Hallucinations can sometimes serve the same role as TDD. If an LLM hallucinates a method that doesn’t exist, sometimes that’s because it makes sense to have a method like that and you should implement it. A detailed counterargument to this position can be found here[0]. In short, what is colloquially described as "LLM hallucinations" do not serve any plausible role in software design other than to introduce an opportunity for software engineers to stop and think about the problem being solved. See also Clark's third law[1]. 0 - https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of… 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Author of one of the linked weird machine papers here. The use of “Turing complete” in both the ROP and the weird machine literature is both incorrect and misleading; I wrote some comments on this here: http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2018/10/turing-completeness-weird-machin… This does not detract from this post being a good, fun, and interesting read, but for anyone that is puzzled why “Turing complete” should imply “insecure”: It doesn’t.

Kind words - thank you! Halvar wrote a more personal note about the acquisition on his blog: http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/wow.html

don't be like this guy ---> Thomas Dullien http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2007/07/ive-been-denied-entry-to-us-esse…