David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!)

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall

I am Director of System Architecture at SCI Semiconductor and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I remain actively involved in the #CHERI project, where I led the early language / compiler strand of the research, and am the maintainer of the #CHERIoT Platform.

I was on the FreeBSD Core Team for two terms, have been an LLVM developer since 2008, am the author of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime (libobjc2 and associated clang support), and am responsible for libcxxrt and the BSD-licensed device tree compiler.

Opinions expressed by me are not necessarily opinions. In all probability they are random ramblings and should be ignored. Failure to ignore may result in severe boredom and / or confusion. Shake well before opening. Keep refrigerated.

Warning: May contain greater than the recommended daily allowance of sarcasm.

No license, implied or explicit, is granted to use any of my posts for training AI models.

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Published at

2026-04-10T22:09:10Z

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Last Notes

2025-09-09 07:44:25 UTC

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Around ten years ago, one of the FreeBSD developers had an SSH key compromised. This key gave access to the machine with our subversion server on it. And, due to how svn worked, every user had write access to the directory containing the repo.
Subversion does not have any way of doing integrity checks, so the recovery process involved (via a script) checking out each revision in turn, then doing the same with a git mirror, and validating that they were the same.
Audit logs showed that the attacker had logged in, tried running a few Linux commands, got error messages, and logged out. We were *incredibly* fortunate that they didn’t do anything more serious.

2025-08-25 07:41:41 UTC

MSRC: Memory safety bugs are the root cause of around 70% of security vulnerabilities.
Normal people: We should deploy things that mitigate those and reduce the percentage by fixing the bugs.
MS senior leadership: Let’s put a thing that introduces entirely new categories of vulnerability into every product and make developers use coding tools that introduce vulnerabilities that experienced developers never would! Then the 30% will get bigger!

2025-08-20 09:11:13 UTC

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Simple solution: A 10% exit tax on any wealth over $100M. If you give up residency, you are instantly taxed a total of 10% of your wealth. If you think you'll enjoy the next ten years more out of the country, pay the next ten years of wealth tax up front and bugger off.
More complex solution: There needs to be a lot more international cooperation on taxing the morbidly wealthy. This needs to include agreed minima on wealth taxes across all of the places people are likely to want to live, but also sanctions on people who choose to hide from them. For example, people domiciled in countries that are not signatories to extreme-wealth treaties may not:<li>Be passengers in private jets that overfly or land in areas that are. Fine is €1M for the first offence and doubles each time. Fines that are not paid for more than 30 days result in prison time.</li><li>Own a controlling interest in any news or advertising company that operates in a signatory country. Such ownership results in a block for the company.</li><li>Donate to any political party or candidate.</li><li>Own property worth a total of more than the median house price in any signatory country.</li>
If all of the EU countries agreed to that list of conditions, I wonder if US billionaires would start pressuring the US government to sign. I doubt they'd like that set of restrictions on their activities.

2025-07-10 15:45:39 UTC

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It looks as if this is the actual error:<code>CMake Error: The source directory "/usr/ports/x11-themes/plasma6-aurorae/work/aurorae-6.4.2" does not exist.<br>Specify --help for usage, or press the help button on the CMake GUI.<br></code>
The line below appears to have worked:<code>/bin/mkdir -p /usr/ports/x11-themes/plasma6-aurorae/work/.build<br></code>
So I guess the port thinks it's building in the work/.build directory, but is then running CMake to target work/aurorae-6.4.2, which doesn't exist?
Is this in Poudriere, or are you trying to build on a host system (the latter is almost certain to fail for many reasons)?

2025-07-02 14:40:00 UTC

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They can even increase, as long as house-price inflation is lower than wage inflation. Keeping house-price growth at 1-2% and wage growth at 2-3% for a while would slowly fix the problem.

2025-06-22 09:53:51 UTC

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But when they leave, you need to do a few other things:<li>Start properly taxing assets they have in the country.</li><li>Bring back limits on media ownership (no newspapers or TV stations can be majority owned by foreign nationals, for example).</li><li>Ban any direct or indirect contributions to political parties by them.</li>
You want to leave? Leave.
Oh, and ideally do what the USA does and have a big exit tax. Have a reasonably high threshold, maybe £2M, but you pay 50% tax on all assets above that line when you leave.

2025-04-28 09:22:44 UTC

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I don't understand how the Royal Society doesn't realise how much damage it did to their reputation to admit him in the first place.
Even before all of the fascist stuff, he was not a scientist, not a researcher. His contributions to science and engineering were that he was a rich person who funded some work.
Making him a FRS made it very clear that it's not an institution for scientists, it's an institution for plutocrats.
It used to be that being a FRS was something to aspire to an a scientific career. Now it's an easy decline if offered, because who would want to be associated with an institution like that?

2025-01-27 17:54:43 UTC

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Is this all true if you separate out F-Droid as a program and F-Droid as the default repository? My impression of the F-Droid default repository is pretty much aligned with your post, but it's also easy to add other repositories. I'd expect something like WireGuard or Firefox to be able to provide their own F-Droid repository quite easily. Are there also flaws in the client app that make this a bad idea?