The elephant in the room here is that there are hundreds of millions of embedded devices that cannot be upgraded easily and will be running vulnerable binaries essentially forever. This was a problem before of course, but the ease of chaining vulnerabilities takes the issue to a new level.
The only practical defense is for these frontier models to generate _beneficial_ attacks to innoculate older binaries by remote exploits. I dubbed these 'antibotty' networks in a speculative paper last year, but never thought things would move this fast! https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-internet-ecology.pdf
No, the elephant in the room is that even bad actors will now have easier to find vulnerabilities in, maintained or not, widely or in critical places used software. Unmaintained and remotely accessible devices should be discarded as soon as possible, you can't stay waiting till some of the good guys decide to give some time to your niche but critical unmaintained piece of software. Because if there is a possibility of taking profit of it, it will be checked and exploited.
And you can't assume that whatever vulnerability they have will let good guys to do the extra (and legally risky) work of closing the hole.
As doom and gloom as things are generally, I do think things have gotten better. Due to legislation and commercial pressure things like wifi routers shipping with the same default password and open settings have gotten better. Webhosts and ISPs have implemented many improvements to protecting their residential customers.
I take your point, but think that it's also maybe too far.
> As doom and gloom as things are generally, I do think things have gotten better.
The question isn't "are companies making some security improvements?". That's one-sided. The question is "are companies making security improvements FAST ENOUGH to deal with the increased risks?"
And this is precisely why so many of these devices should not be connected to the Internet.
Things like an Internet-connected central heating seem absolutely insane to me, yet people look at me like I'm crazy when I say so. Do you really want your home' heating entirely controller by a publicly accessible device that likely will never be upgraded in case of security issues?
That doesn't help when the company behind the device disappears or stops supporting the device. Or is hacked to convert all the devices they manufactured into a botnet.
> The only practical defense is for these frontier models
Another practical defence for many of these devices would be to just disconnect them... I feel like an old man yelling at a cloud, but too much is connected to the Internet these days.
It can be easier to hack the device and patch it than determine which device it is. This is nearly always true for the non-technical, but it is true for most technical people as well. Many of the devices in peoples homes that aren't being actively patched are not that old!
On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.
From another comment below, it's just a nice short title to convey that we're going back in time and not one to set your watch by.
We first submitted the article to the CACM a while ago.
The review process takes some time and "Twelve years of
Docker containers" didn't have quite the same vibe.
(The CACM reviewers helped improve our article quite a bit. The time spent there was worth it!)
cool! What services have you shipped as unikernels? Docker doesn't have to be an alternative; it can help with the build/run pipeline for them too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkfXHBb-M4A (Dockercon 2015!)
Unfortunately Apple managed to omit the feature we all want that only they can implement: namespaces for native macOS!
Instead we got yet another embedded-Linux-VM which (imo) didn't really add much to the container ecosystem except a bunch of nice Swift libraries (such as the ext2 parsing library, which is very handy).
> I don't think SLIRP was originally for palm pilots, given it was released two years before.
That's a mistake indeed; "popularised by" might have been better. Before my beloved Palmpilot arrived one Christmas, I was only using SLIRP to ninja in Netscape and MUD sessions onto a dialup connection which wasn't a very mainstream use.
Those are global to the machine; generally not an issue and seccomp rules can filter out undesirable syscalls to other containers. But GPU kernel/userspace driver matching has been a huge headache; see https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/... in the article for how the CDI is (sort of) helping standardise this.
We've given up on native Windows containers in OCaml after trying to use them for our CI builds for many years. See https://www.tunbury.org/2026/02/19/obuilder-hcs/ for our recent switch to HCS instead. Compared to Linux containers, they're very much a second-class citizen in the Microsoft worldview of Docker.
However, Dockerfiles are so popular because they run shell commands and permit 'socially' extending someone else shell commands; tacking commands onto the end of someone else's shell script is a natural process. /bin/sh is unreasonably effective at doing anything you need to a filesystem, and if the shell exposes a feature, it has probably been used in a Dockerfile somewhere.
Every other solution, especially declarative ones, tend to come up short when _layering_ images quickly and easily. However, I agree they're good if you control the entire declarative spec.
docker got popular because it had better DX (better tooling), it was like a super lightweight VM (and initially people really wanted to put init and SSH into containers)
easy but powerful, it's not just packaging, it's also a very basic deployment system too. (docker ps) and said better allowed a relatively foolproof cross-platform develop-deploy loop.
The only practical defense is for these frontier models to generate _beneficial_ attacks to innoculate older binaries by remote exploits. I dubbed these 'antibotty' networks in a speculative paper last year, but never thought things would move this fast! https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-internet-ecology.pdf