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posted by chromas on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the NOO-GOD!-NO.-GOD.-PLEASE.-NO.-NO!!!-NO!!!-NOOOOOO!!! dept.

Mozilla partners with Intel, Red Hat and Fastly to take WebAssembly beyond the browser – TechCrunch

Mozilla, Intel, Red Hat and Fastly today announced the launch of the Bytecode Alliance, a new open-source group that focuses on “creating new software foundations, building on standards such as WebAssembly and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI).”

Mozilla has long championed WebAssembly, the open standard that allows browsers to execute compiled programs in the browser. This allows developers to write their applications in languages like C, C++ and Rust and have those programs execute at native speed, all without having to rely on JavaScript, which would take much longer to parse and execute, especially on mobile devices.

[...] The mission of this new group goes beyond the browser, though. It wants to establish “a capable, secure platform that allows application developers and service providers to confidently run untrusted code, on any infrastructure, for any operating system or device, leveraging decades of experience doing so inside web browsers.” The argument here is that there is plenty of potential for WebAssembly outside of the browser because it allows untrusted code components to interact with trusted code inside of a sandboxed environment. Indeed, a Mozilla spokesperson noted that WebAssembly has generated more interest from businesses that are interested in this use case than from the traditional application developers and web technologists. Hence this new alliance.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:18AM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:18AM (#919756) Homepage

    > confidently run untrusted code

    I have a space station to sell you.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:45PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:45PM (#919935) Journal

    That's not a contradiction, but it *does* require that you have a huge amount of trust in the sandbox that you run the code in. So far every jail or sandbox or virtual machine has turned out to have flaws that allow escaping, so having that trust isn't exactly reasonable, but it's not a logical contradiction.

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