Well, now we know what John Titor was really looking for with his leet IBM 5100 mining rig.

.... not even a kernel panic?

$615,000 in drug, terrorist and child porn money? Or assuming some innocent parties involved in Bitcoin, at the very least $615,000 of juicy leads and contact details for the people who are dealing the hard stuff? Yes, it's conceivable that they perhaps might. You know, since tracking and catching thsi stuff is pretty much the number one job of all the West's police, intelligence and militaries at the moment.

Lie down with Bitcoins, wake up with whatever it is that Bitcoin merchants are selling. And possibly the FBI knocking on your door to ask nicely if you have any drug dealers or terrorists in your address book.

Yes, because the advocates of those currencies are loudly crowing that the entire point is to enable criminal acts. That it's a perfect money laundering service and that this is a great thing.

But if a government responded rationally to this widely advertised lawbreaking by shutting down the people who launder money and the mechanism they're using to do it, that would somehow be immoral, and anyway they wouldn't do it. Because, um. Government bad, government inefficient, Bitcoin rules, FBI drools?

I'm shocked, shocked that Bitcoin exchanges might conceivably be running into money problems related to fund and transfer freezes from ongoing international drug investigations. That's simply not possible, because Bitcoin!

Yeah, since deliberately thumbing your nose at multiple international anti-money-laundering treaties by associating with blatant drug dealers and then having all the governments which subscribe to those treaties respond rationally by shutting you down, is.... a conspiracy.

I don't see what's hard to understand about this. Bitcoin's primary market appears to be criminals. Bitcoin advocates advertise this fact widely and make it one of their primary selling points for cryptocurrency. Therefore, anyone trading in Bitcoin-to-national-currency is waving a huge sign saying 'I'm moving money for criminals, please arrest me now. Oh, but you can't because it's cryptocurrency and you don't know for sure that I'm a criminal myself! Just, you know, that I've made millions selling services to criminals! Double dare you to arrest me! Triple, quadruple, googolplex dare you! Phpppppttttt! Ha ha, stupid cops!'

And then mysteriously! Bitcoin exchanges start getting... unspecified "problems".... to do with not being allowed to bank any more.... which they can't talk about because of... unspecified "investigations".

Yeah, I'm going to put that down to a completely coincidental series of bizarre freak accidents with no connection whatever to international law enforcement's rational response to widely advertised international lawbreaking. That seems perfectly plausible and anyone who suspects that it's just a case of crooks getting into trouble from cops is a 'conspiracy theorist'.

Especially a completely illegal one based on experimental, buggy technology under ongoing cyberattack, selling products that ruin people's lives, are supplied by organised crime, and are actively targeted by high-level federal and international prosecutors with access to military espionage technology - and a complete dump of your predecessor's transaction databases.

There's high-risk, and then there's unethical high risk, and then there's completely stupid, unethical high risk, and then there's... whatever this is, it's pegging the scale.

I'm not going to say "good luck", but I would advise even the rubberneckers to stand well clear of the impact crater.

I think you could substitute "tailor-made" for "bespoke" in any context - including actual tailoring - and get exactly the same meaning. It's a linguistic metaphor, yes. Do you object to any other commonly-used metaphors?

Of course it will happen. But in these liberal times it will be retitled "Permitted Planet".

Yep. There's a very close connection between objects, dictionaries, relational tables, files/filesystems, and functions - all centred around binary relations, a fairly well-understood mathematical object - which seems well worth exploring. However, there haven't been (to my knowledge) many languages which attempt to explore this connection at a fundamental level.

Here's a suggestion: we could fairly simply extend S-expressions so they allow for multiple lists or atoms after the dot in a dotted pair. This would allow us to represent binary relations in a simple syntax that reduces to an ordinary list in the case of a relation containing only one row. You end up then with a very low-level but powerful data model which both simplifies and extends the 'array' and 'object' structures in today's scripting languages (eg JSON), and SQL tables, and which has nice mathematical properties: for example, you can union and intersect these relations as you would sets, which is an operation which is undefined on objects or dictionaries. We can also do Cartesian product which is an extension of list appending, _and_ a corresponding Cartesian divide which corresponds to a key-value lookup.

From here, we just need to extend this with a semantics for function evaluation to interpret relations as functions and allow for infinite-sized, recursive computed relations. Which gets a bit tricker, but if we got this, we could represent, say, the entire Internet as a filesystem. Would that be useful?

How about taking it just one step forward to a stream of streams? Then we could at least create object-like structures but with minimal overhead. Plus, it would be a fully recursive definition that would lend itself to virtualisation.

Of course, S-expressions are only 56 years old so such a radical proposal isn't likely to be adopted any time soon.

Exactly. I'd like to see more exploration of something like Kahn process networks as a fundamental programming abstraction; it seems to me that we need to be thinking of programs, filesystems and networks as examples of the same thing. Our networks are becoming software-defined (especially in virtualisation), our chipsets are compiled from languages like VHDL, our programs are becoming parallelised, and our filesystems are starting to grow virtual nodes and do processing. Seems dumb to be maintaining multiple completely separate families of languages and tools each with their own subtle incompatibilities and bugs when we could settle on just one and work all the bugs out once, then use it forever.

Not even close, unless you're thinking about Plan 9.

A truly 'everything is a file' Unix would implement BSD sockets and X11 windows as files, just for a start. Can you do that on Linux yet?

And that's why every week we have reports of major data centers being hacked. This is not a sustainable course for the global Internet. Eventually, people are going to die from infosec disasters. (In drone warfare, they already have, but that's also a political problem.)

Yes, we'll always have bugs. But we have to get to the point where we have zero tolerance for _preventable_ bugs, such as machine code level crashes. Raw x86 code is simply too unsafe to run at any speed on the Internet; it gives no fundamental guarantees about separation of memory space. At the very least, we need managed languages with an extremely tiny, simple, provably correct kernel that make it mathematically impossible for one process to smash its stack or corrupt another's heap. We've had solutions for decades; microkernels like L4, languages like Erlang, Haskell and D. We can replace failed, non-securable syntaxes like raw ASCII SQL queries with nested list structures that don't suffer from quote-escaping vulnerabilities. We simply refuse to develop and deploy these solutions, because of no better reason than laziness, institutional inertia and a sense of "it's not my problem if my program is not provably secure". Wrong. It's everybody's Net, and that means it's everybody's problem.

As an industry, we're at the stage where medicine was before the discovery of antiseptic surgery. We have no fundamental data hygiene in our execution environments. We kill as much as we cure. This has to change.

Except that in today's hostile Internet, WHEN that broken Internet-facing process crashes it WILL be because it was pwned by shellcode, and if that process had write access to core files, your entire server is now rooted. If that process also had any read or write credentials to your local network, your entire data center possibly just got rooted also.

Are you _really_ saying that the appropriate thing to do in that situation is to simply restart the process and continue? You'd be better to flash-wipe and reinstall at least the entire server node, and probably also change all your internal administration passwords. Otherwise, you're an infosec disaster waiting to happen.

You're fighting a full-scale hot cyberwar out there, don't forget. It's no longer 1970. You don't have the luxury of trusting that incoming packets come from universities and defense contractors with administrators you can chew out with a phone call when they misconfigure stuff by accident. NSA owns the wires and your packets come direct from the Russian Mafia and Syrian Electronic Army.

It's totally a hack, and _because_ machines are never perfect you'd better be 150% certain that every single step in your error-recovery process is double and triple checked and accounts for every possible side-effect of executing evil x86 machine code with root permissions.

Look, we both agree that Murphy rules. And you're right to say 'because random stuff happens, I need an overseeing process to automatically fix it'. But auto-restarting pwned services is not that fix, anymore, and it really hasn't been since 1999.

They outsourced security to a Fortran 66 preprocessor? Well that explains why my Linksys router is currently trying to crack Minuteman silo launch codes.