Re: Extropians Investing in the Future

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Wed, 25 Dec 1996 00:13:20 +0000


On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

> Exquislay myaw? Perfect verification is impossible in the sense of
> detecting those programs, *and* *only* *those* *programs*, which violate
> security.

Oops. You just rejected 'JavaDoom' -- three million people disabled their
verifiers immediately.

> If you're willing to stop some innocent programs, complete
> verification is easy. And since no Java compiler that I know of
> produces secure but (currently) unverifiable code, there's no problem.

I see -- so 'exec "rm -rf $HOME/*"' (or the whatever the Java equivalent
is) will produce verifiable code but delete all my files. How useful.

Mark

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