What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client • Hacker News Board

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#31

Post by jmesserly » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:18 AM UTC

forgotusername wrote: post #22

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Google is the only one championing NaCl right now. I don't see how they get from their current position to some sort of lock in ala Microsoft though.

Views of your personal data come via their APIs, and never the raw data itself; Microsoft only ever owned the code.

What does NaCL have to do with Google APIs? It's a client side technology. You can talk to whatever server(s) you want. (Presumably subject to same origin policy like JS, which if anything means it's easier to talk to your servers rather than Google's or someone else's).

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#32

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:19 AM UTC

smosher wrote: post #24

The main hack done to the compiler is that generated code avoids certain constructs that inhibit perfect static analysis, allowing the NaCL host (i.e. Google Chrome at present) to verify the behaviour of some untrusted binary before ever executing it (just like Java does). I am having a hard time with this. At first I thought this amounted to a claim that the halting problem had been solved, or else that Java and NaC…

[deleted]

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#33

Post by smosher » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:19 AM UTC

DarkShikari wrote: post #27

smosher wrote: post #24

The main hack done to the compiler is that generated code avoids certain constructs that inhibit perfect static analysis, allowing the NaCL host (i.e. Google Chrome at present) to verify the behaviour of some untrusted binary before ever executing it (just like Java does). I am having a hard time with this. At first I thought this amounted to a claim that the halting problem had been solved, or else that Java and NaC…

At first I thought this amounted to a claim that the halting problem had been solved, That's not what the halting problem means! There is no rule that says you cannot prove a program is safe: the rule is only that you cannot prove any arbitrary program is safe. NaCl gets around that by adding checks to the code (bounds checks, etc) to anywhere that it can't prove is safe.

Perfect static analysis is certainly halting-equivalent. What you're describing falls short of perfection, which is what I've suggested.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#34

Post by smosher » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:26 AM UTC

jmesserly wrote: post #28

smosher wrote: post #24

The main hack done to the compiler is that generated code avoids certain constructs that inhibit perfect static analysis, allowing the NaCL host (i.e. Google Chrome at present) to verify the behaviour of some untrusted binary before ever executing it (just like Java does). I am having a hard time with this. At first I thought this amounted to a claim that the halting problem had been solved, or else that Java and NaC…

I don't know exactly what NaCL does, but the JVM/CLR verification is all about making sure you don't write over someone else's memory, jump to some arbitrary address, etc. Essentially the problem is: how do you run untrusted code in the same address space, without it getting all of your process's permissions. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Virtual_Machine#Bytecode_v...

Ah, thanks. I think I have a handle on the size and shape of it.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#35

Post by petegrif » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:27 AM UTC

tldr(all) this is a paranoid rambling piece that may just have some sense in it somewhere but it's so incoherently written it's tough to find it.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#36

Post by petegrif » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:33 AM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #14

I think Microsoft really missed a good bet by not embracing NaCl years ago. They have a huge preexisting native codebase. Probably a plurality of their development teams are native code-focused. Their customers employ hundreds of thousands of native developers and probably billions of lines of native code. C/C++ is such an inescapable part of their ecosystem that after almost a decade of selling C#/.NET as the future…

Agreed. And I still don't understand Mozilla's problem with NaCl. They argue that js is now nearly as fast as native. Well...even if that were true it ignores the fact that as you point out there is huge investment in legacy code that NaCl unlocks AND it ignores the fact that js makes it easy to copy what may be valuable IP.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#37

Post by petegrif » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:35 AM UTC

May I suggest a rather more innocent possibility wrt Google's intentions? They want us to be able to run high performance apps in the browser. And guess what - most of us would like that.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#38

Post by nknight » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:35 AM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #10

Wait, wait, wait. Because a platform is near-native performance, is cross platform and may run in a virtual machine, they are becoming Microsoft and locking people in? WHAT? (Beyond the absurdity of leaping to that conclusion, it's an open spec and the main implementation is open source. I understand that alternative implementations are needed for "open spec" to have significant meaning, but still). That and the last…

> RE this whole conspiracy (not mocking it by calling it that...)

Then I will. It's a conspiracy theory, worthy of all the mocking typically associated with such a thing.

Anyone who's been watching Google long enough, closely enough, knows how out of character this would be. Such efforts, not to mention the purported motivation, is not in their nature.

Google employees start hundreds (thousands?) of new projects every year with little coordination. Some of these end up becoming big, official things, and we end up with Gmail. They throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

There might be some group inside Google thinking along the lines this guy is. I doubt it, but it's possible. It might even be the native client guys. What there isn't, is a massive internal conspiracy crossing every product team up and down the chain of command, aimed at making Google the sole arbiter of what can run on your device.

Even if the executives wanted it to happen, it couldn't. How do I know this?

Because Google is full of hackers who would instantly revolt. They've had enough problems with things like their real name policy and the handful of places they've had to acquiesce to DRM.

A coordinated effort to make Google into The One True Gatekeeper into your electronic life on a scale unmatched even by 1990s Microsoft? I await the flying pigs.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#39

Post by peterwwillis » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:43 AM UTC

I didn't even read past the third paragraph. It's not even the creepy, conspiratorial way he talks... who the hell puts up a single domain, with a single plain-text page of content, with a font big enough for my grandmother to read it, just to complain about Google? It's weird.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#40

Post by ootachi » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 5:46 AM UTC

nknight wrote: post #38

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #10

Wait, wait, wait. Because a platform is near-native performance, is cross platform and may run in a virtual machine, they are becoming Microsoft and locking people in? WHAT? (Beyond the absurdity of leaping to that conclusion, it's an open spec and the main implementation is open source. I understand that alternative implementations are needed for "open spec" to have significant meaning, but still). That and the last…

> RE this whole conspiracy (not mocking it by calling it that...) Then I will. It's a conspiracy theory, worthy of all the mocking typically associated with such a thing. Anyone who's been watching Google long enough, closely enough, knows how out of character this would be. Such efforts, not to mention the purported motivation, is not in their nature. Google employees start hundreds (thousands?) of new projects ever…

There is not a single company in history that failed to get away with malicious behavior due to being "full of hackers that would instantly revolt". Engineers do not have executive power within companies. Executives do. Engineers "revolt" by quitting, and at Google they are easy to replace.