I never get tired of re-reading this. It goes right to the heart of what is magical and wonderful and also scary about computer programming, the sheer power of abstraction available and the unintuitive consequences that are a result of those possibilities.
It also makes me wonder how much we can rely on things generally held to be secure. I certainly have never tried to guarantee that the compilers I get from the distros I use are fully honest, much less disassemble my BIOS, and of course the tools I would try to use even if I did achieve that level of paranoia might not be reliable and I would need other tools to test the tools, and the next thing you know I'm out in the woods sawing at trees to get lumber to carve because only a hand-built analytical engine is a reliable and trustworthy platform in any provable way.
The world needs an opt-in trusted execution environment. If it is mandated from above, then people will rebel against it. At the same time, it must not put compliant programs at a disadvantage to noncompliant malware, as most sandboxing schemes do so today.
It also makes me wonder how much we can rely on things generally held to be secure. I certainly have never tried to guarantee that the compilers I get from the distros I use are fully honest, much less disassemble my BIOS, and of course the tools I would try to use even if I did achieve that level of paranoia might not be reliable and I would need other tools to test the tools, and the next thing you know I'm out in the woods sawing at trees to get lumber to carve because only a hand-built analytical engine is a reliable and trustworthy platform in any provable way.