Sarcasm noted. So... you think this fake call check is a bad thing? Or do you have a different design to suggest that would work better?

UCS32 is certainly an option. It would probably turn me off from Rust entirely, though, at least for my current work. When your device only has a few KB of RAM, quadrupling the size of your strings would be really painful. I'm unhappy that my pointers and register-sized integers are each 8 bytes, so a slice consumes 16 bytes (pointer plus length), minimum. I hate it so much I might consider creating my own string type that only handles strings < 64kb in length, so I could use an 8-byte pointer and a two-byte length -- but ARM has pretty strict alignment requirements so the compiler would pad the u16 out to eight bytes anyway. And all of my strings are error messages which are seven-bit ASCII.

As for your abstracted version... note that in my code I not only don't have GC, I don't even have a heap... no dynamic allocation :-)

With Rust as-is, that means I don't actually have String, but I *do* have &str.

You can certainly argue that one language shouldn't try to address the requirements of tiny microcontrollers to servers with hundreds of GB of RAM... but it's actually really nice that it does.

Rust doesn't try to prevent devs from writing bad code, it tries to prevent devs from writing unsafe code (i.e. code that can exhibit undefined behavior), and the approach to strings is safe. If you index a string at byte offsets, and try to use that data as a string and it's not valid UTF-8, your program panics in a safe, well-defined way :-D

Perhaps not "as easy", but certainly not hard. Spend some time thinking about what kinds of covert and overt pressures might be brought to bear.

Aside: As an American, I think it's very sad that people lump the US and Russia together in this way. I think it's even sadder that I can't honestly argue that they're wrong. At most I can try to argue that there is still a significant difference of degree, if not kind, but it's not really worth making the argument because the degree of different is heading rapidly to zero. I deeply hope we can turn it around, and I'm doing what I can in that direction, but...

The latter. I'm pretty confident that TLS is secure. The modern ciphersuites are tight and things like the certificate transparency log make it so that while the TLAs might be able to subvert the CA process, they can only do it in small-scale, tightly-scoped ways. If you are a personal target of interest of any national security agency, you're screwed. They absolutely can get into every aspect of a private citizen's life if they want to put some effort into it. But the transparency log means that if they attempted to do this in any kind of large-scale way it would be discovered and publicized, so the fact that we don't hear about it truly does mean that they're not doing TLS penetration at scale.

However, even if they can't get the content of the connections, they can see where you're connecting to, and when. That sort of traffic analysis provides a surprising amount of information, and it can be done at scale -- and using a third-party VPN generally makes it easier, not harder. Layering VPNs can help a lot. Done carefully, you can structure it so that someone would have to control all of the layered VPN servers in order to track your connections. Layering plus multiplexing (using multiple providers and picking different routes and exit nodes for every connection) could make it really hard.

And if you don't really believe that traffic analysis is a concern, then there's really no point to using a VPN at all (except for location shifting), because TLS really is quite secure. It's definitely silly to, for example, fire up a VPN before connecting to your bank while at a coffee shop or an airport, which is exactly the pitch that many VPN services make. "Be wary of untrusted networks" is their pitch, and it's stupid[*]. If you're concerned about your online activity being tracked it's the "trusted" networks you're on most of the time that are the point of concern for traffic analysis. And the "trusted network" that may be the biggest concern is your VPN provider.

[*] Note that it's not stupid to be frightened of untrusted networks, but kinds of risks that exist with untrusted networks are generally not mitigated by VPNs. The best solution to those risks is keeping your device patched up.

There are a few ways to do it. The most common is to use the chars() method, which gives you an iterator over characters. So, for your example, something like "s.chars().skip(5).take(5).collect()". If you really need to do heavy unicode text manipulation (e.g. you're writing a text editor or something), you probably want to use some of the available crates, e.g. unicode-segmentation.

Clearly, as you say, this isn't what a lot of people would consider full, native support for UTF-8. Really doing it right would impose a heavy runtime penalty on the vast majority of simple string usage that doesn't need it, so Rust compromised: If you have a &str or a String in Rust, you know that what it contains is valid UTF-8 -- which means that when you create one you're paying the validation penalty, even if you don't need it... however, the penalties scale in an unsurprising way. When you create a string from bytes, the validation is an O(n) operation, but you also have to copy the bytes, so it's already O(n). When you slice a string, the slice validation only has to check the first and last characters of the slice, so it's O(1), as you would expect slicing to be. You might not naively expect slicing to panic with a UTF-8 validation error, but you should expect that it might panic with a bounds-checking error so the fact that it might panic isn't surprising. And, of course, you can use the get() method to get Err() instead of a panic.

Full native UTF-8 support would be a lot heavier. Many common String operations would be O(n) rather than O(1) -- including indexing! The APIs would be quite confusing to people accustomed to C-style strings, too, another cost. So, Rust doesn't do that. Instead, if you want the length of a string in Unicode characters, you use s.chars().count(). If you want a substring with character offsets you use s.chars().skip(n).take(m).collect(), or similar. These operations do not look like they're O(1) which is good, because they're not. They're also not nearly as slow/heavy as they look.

Like most compromises, this one makes no one really happy, and many people will disagree that it's the right choice. But I don't really see a better option, do you? Keeping in mind that everything from device drivers and bare-metal microcontroller code to browsers and editors is included in the target space, and that having different wide and narrow string types has proven to be a bad idea.

Leave politics out of the decisions around energy (coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, whatever) and let the free market figure it out and you will get a good outcome for energy users.

I should have included organized crime syndicates in that list, though thanks to Google's TLS-all-the-things push traffic sniffing is less useful for stealing money, and criminals generally have less interest in spying on people by doing traffic analysis.

Because Russia and the US are incapable of compromising or suborning providers from elsewhere?

Those are all ways to avoid installing questionable software on your primary machine, which is good, but they don't address the fact that you're still routing all of your traffic through someone else's server -- a server that tends to concentrate lots of potentially interesting traffic in one place, making it a much higher priority target than your typical ISP.

If the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world don't own or at least have significant hooks into all of the major VPN service providers, someone should be fired for not doing their job.

Really? I've never, ever heard that pitch for AI.

Also, the amount of energy required to reverse it... it's hard to see where that could possibly have come from.

The name of the product is "Bomb", and "Bomb" is the default Bluetooth name.

I don't know whether that makes you advice invalid, or all the more salient.

ROTFL

Any account with permission to upload packages to NPM should be required to have strong 2FA (TOTP or a hardware key of some sort or something equally secure), have session tokens that are linked to the browser/IP/device (to prevent session token theft) and maybe also require a 2FA auth before a file upload.

Although I am sure there are some who will say "that's not acceptable, we need to be able to automate things and 2FA gets in the way". Sorry but security against hackers is more important than being able to click "go" on some CI setup and have it automatically upload the new version with no human actions.

Social engineering redux... except now you only have to convince a sycophantic and overly helpful AI.

Many people incorrectly think of proxies and VPNs (especially VPNs) as a security and privacy enhancement, but unless you're operating the proxy/VPN server yourself they're just as likely to be a massive security and privacy risk. The problem is that they concentrate all of the traffic you'd most like to keep secret in one server, and depending on exactly how the system works, may require installing software on your local machine with ~root permissions. If the operator is malicious, this is a really dangerous combination.

These are useful tools for location shifting and -- in fairly rare cases, and with VPNs only -- from hiding traffic from malicious. But third-party proxy/VPN services should always be viewed with suspicion. Obviously this is even more true when the provider is Russian... though it's pretty likely that wasn't made clear to the people who used the service.

A person can be sane and immoral, sane and moral, insane and immoral or insane and moral. "Orthogonal" is perhaps a little too strong, since it implies the absence of any relationship, but certainly all the combinations are possible.

Sanity and morality are orthogonal.