(Former Mozilla Distinguished Engineer here FWIW.)

Parsing WebAssembly modules does represent a small increase in attack surface, and there is additional attack surface if the browser has a dedicated WASM interpreter or JIT compiler. But in Firefox, for example, the WASM optimizing compiler uses the same Ionmonkey infrastructure as the JS engine so there isn't much new attack surface in that JIT compiler. That is very different from say Flash which had its own entirely different compiler.

WASM applications use the same browser APIs as JS does, so there is no new attack surface there. That's a big deal and one of the benefits of WASM's design over say (P)NaCl.

Overall, yeah, WASM adds some attack surface, but not much compared to the rest of the browser. And it's all contained in the sandboxed renderer process(es).

Stallman is 68 years old. He's had plenty of time to learn social graces with or without assistance.

If he is unable to interact appropriately with other people and unable to learn how, then we can have compassion on him, but he is poorly qualified to be on the board of a public-facing organisation.

He's not referring to the transaction rate there.

Oops, a basic mistake just destroyed your credibility!

You're absolutely right. This just a hyperbolic attack based on a misunderstanding of what PWAs are.

Yes, and it's still there on mobile! The removal of SSB is only for the desktop.

It's a troll post. He doesn't even mention breakthroughs in distributed version control, CI, Rust, machine learning, the cloud, etc, that have changed everything.

https is about much more than just protecting "financial" or "security" information. For example people browsing over http can be redirected to arbitrary destinations as a DDoS attack. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Our first lockdown, at its peak, was stricter than those in Australia, but it lasted a much shorter time. By May 14 we were at "alert level 2" which is mostly normal life, but most of Australia didn't reach a similar level for another month, because community cases kept bubbling up in Australia. It's far from obvious that Australia's approach was a win overall. Compare Australia with NZ here:
https://ourworldindata.org/cor...

Your argument that we should have "changed strategy" is also off base. It has never been clear that Australia was going to achieve elimination, and it certainly wasn't clear before we had already begun stepping down alert levels in NZ.

> If in the future the virus goes crazy in NZ killing thousands they will look like fools for wasting all that effort on elimination

Not at all. Whatever happens from here on, we will benefit from everything that has been learned worldwide about how to treat COVID19 over the last few months --- months where we have been enjoying normal life, unlike almost every other country.

> you might love being locked down but I do not.

Nobody loves being locked down. With our current strategy we should soon be able to get back to alert level 1.

Note that outside Auckland, NZ isn't having a "lockdown" according to many countries' definitions. E.g. Sweden officially has no lockdown but they don't allow gatherings of more than 50 people; outside Auckland under alert level 2 we can have gatherings of up to 100 people.

It looks like the BCG vaccine may reduce the severity of COVID19 but it by no means guarantees to reduce COVID19 to an "asymptomatic or a minor condition".
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

"They're juicing up the COVID numbers" is a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.

If you were able to do the experiment where somehow you persuade people to not change their behavior for the sake of the economy, you would find COVID19 killing a LOT more people as most people who need hospital care would die due to the hospitals being full.

And it turns out that killing a lot of people ALSO tanks the economy, so you lose again.

When hospitals get full of COVID19 patients, are forced to triage so only people with the best chance to live get ICU and the rest are sent home to die ... when they start packing bodies into refrigerated trucks ... people get scared and make drastic changes to their behavior, and the economy tanks.

With COVID19 that happened in NY and has been on the verge of happening in multiple US states, even *with* partial lockdowns. With no lockdowns or population behavior changes it would certainly happen everywhere. It did NOT happen with any flu epidemic since 1918, which is one way we know COVID19 is worse than those epidemics.

You can say the same thing for every plague, war and catastrophe in history. It doesn't prove anything.

Most people here in NZ don't expect to remain free of COVID19 forever, but we do expect there to be some kind of vaccine. Even an imperfect vaccine will be a huge help in managing the disease when it arrives for good.