Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea? Because I see this as "Google's ActiveX"
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Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#12Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea? Because I see this as "Google's ActiveX"
Read the paper. It's a subset of x86 that retains better security properties for distribution.
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#13Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea? Because I see this as "Google's ActiveX"
Read the paper. It's a subset of x86 that retains better security properties for distribution. http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...
Very interesting. The security features are very thorough.
Of course, until someone finds a vulnerability, or a way through the validator, or an exploit on an abstracted function.
Still, it's a good security model
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#14As a side note, why is it that I have to sign in to Google in order to be able to see this? Is registration /really/ necessary for Google Groups?
If you're signed in to a Google account already but your session is inactive, you might be asked to re-authenticate. If you're not signed in at all, you don't get asked.
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read the paper. It's a subset of x86 that retains better security properties for distribution. http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...
Very interesting. The security features are very thorough. Of course, until someone finds a vulnerability, or a way through the validator, or an exploit on an abstracted function. Still, it's a good security model
The good news is its being very actively pro-actively fuzzed and fixed.
Worth looking at too: zeroVM http://zerovm.org/
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#16As a side note, why is it that I have to sign in to Google in order to be able to see this? Is registration /really/ necessary for Google Groups?
You are right. It's very annoying. It's even worse than having links that are behind a paywall, because at least a paywall usually indicates that funds are flowing to the person (reporter, etc.) who created the content. The google groups situation is quite different, and quite annoying. I never login to google groups to see something listed on HN. I wonder whether HN could provide an option to let readers avoid such…
Another poster said this only happens if you are logged in but need a session refresh.
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#17I'm a fan of fast native code, but I worry that this promotes sneaky code in the background once it gets widely adopted.
With javascript we basically have open-source web apps. I often skim through js source to learn new tricks - and obfuscation doesn't really stop me (apart from google's java-translated js) . With compiled NaCl I probably wouldn't be able to find out a lot.
I'm not talking about "stealing user data" when I say sneaky code. No, with compiled native code a whole new game is started: computational-intensive code. It wouldn't be that difficult to include code that gets a job to work on for a few minutes: breaking captchas, brute-forcing passwords, anything that shift computational effort from a server to a client.
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#18I wonder when we will see the first obfuscated C for NaCI code contest.
Just a note, it's NaCl, spelled NACL, as in the molecule "sodium chloride" (and the abbreviation of the name "Native Client").
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#19Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea? Because I see this as "Google's ActiveX"
Read the paper. It's a subset of x86 that retains better security properties for distribution. http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...
At best that takes care of the security issues. The other thing that makes ActiveX an affront to the web is the platform lock-in.
x86 code is not suitable as a web standard. (And neither is the LLVM intermediate representation, for reasons expounded on in e.g. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/4...)
Re: Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl
#20As a side note, why is it that I have to sign in to Google in order to be able to see this? Is registration /really/ necessary for Google Groups?
It works fine here (Chrome on Windows) even if I log out. I think it's a bug. Are you on a mobile browser?
Yeah I think it's a bug with mobile... happens on my ipad all the time (super annoying) but not my PC.