Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 115
But this doesn't mean Google doesn't also have a lot to answer for. Gmail IMAP compliance in particular is pretty bad, and SMTP handling of error conditions pushes things right to the limits if not past them.
The effective Lua code part is rather small compared to the overall code. Our estimation of development ‘cost’ in Lua is over 3000 lines of code, which for an average developer should take about a month to create and debug.
Flame is 20Mb total, and a lot of that is almost certainly written in C/C++ (Lua VM, sqlite3, zlib, libbz2).
The article then says, "[Flame] was built with gamer code". Also incorrect. Lua is a general-purpose scripting language in no way specific to gaming. And I've heard nothing that says code directly related to any sort of game is part of it.
That's the last time the article mentions Lua or gaming, but no further mentions are necessary. A false connection has been made, and by hyping up the danger of Flame, e.g., the UN views it is a "significant threat", they're effectively blaming game developers through guilt by association.
The article also says, "Flame came to light when the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (which oversees cyberactivities for the body) received reports of unusual activity." The implication is Flame was responsible for the activity. Again according to Kaspersky, that's not the case. They were attempting to track down something called "Codename Wiper" that was responsible for actually deleting data when they stumbled across Flame by accident.
In contrast, the MSNBC article makes it quite clear that only part of Flame was written in Lua. It then engages in a fairly coherent discussion of why Lua might have been chosen to implement part of Flame, quoting various sources with various different takes on it. And the headline is rather obviously intended to be facetious.
So, on one hand we have a fairly coherent piece that actually tries to get into software design philosophy. And on the other, we have your typical pile of crap from Fox News.
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