Linux creator explains why a truly secure computing platform will never exist

The thing is we haven&#x27;t really been trying. Capability-based security is still an academic niche, thread-level parallelism never managed to take on instruction-level parallelism, high-level computer architectures barely receive interest anymore. System programming with a GC is considered anathema, and microkernels have been demonized (in no small part thanks to Torvalds himself).<p>I don&#x27;t know if a &quot;truly secure computing platform&quot; can exist, but one cannot derive assumptions from the current landscape.

&quot;Torvalds talked about security as something unattainable in a Perfect Sense&quot;. I would have been more curious to hear his response about Security in the Real Sense.<p>Given what most current OSes are engaged in: surveillance, tracking, data-warehousing, data-sharing with untold&#x2F;unnamed &quot;trusted&quot; partners, civil rights violations, illegal search&#x2F;seizure, 5th amendment rights violations, etal... his answer skirts the issue entirely.<p>I guess... what he was saying is that he&#x27;s like Linux (The Kernel). To paraphrase him: He&#x27;s an enabler. Perhaps an imp. Something totally hidden and out of people&#x27;s mind when it comes to how OSes have been weaponized against people. He has no position on the matter.

Reading this on mobile, I accidentally tapped no less than three ads, having to then go back, close the bottom ad banner again and re-find my place.<p>Ugh. This is why people use ad blockers.

Automotive security is such a terrible example for the security&#x2F;usability tradeoff. Cars would be no less usable, but incredibly more secure, if they simply isolated the brakes on a separate CAN bus.<p>Security&#x2F;usability tradeoffs do exist, but it&#x27;s not zero-sum. Linus seems to think it is, which is why Linux will never come close to being a truly secure computing platform.

And the discussion descends into the exact kind of security absolutism that he was warning about...