[jacquesm]

> maybe we can do better 40 years later?

But we do. There are plenty of programming languages besides C.

Also, while we're at it, UNIX is now a good 50 years old and if anything it contributes as much to the problem of unsafe software as anything else out there, every driver has the potential to hose the entire system.

[indymike]

> Also, while we're at it, UNIX is now a good 50 years old and if anything it contributes as much to the problem of unsafe software as anything else out there, every driver has the potential to hose the entire system.

If Unix was a single OS and codebase this holds water, but Linux isn't Unix, and real Unix comes in lots of flavors, and each has it's own set of issues. In any OS, save some microkernels, interfacing to hardware creates problems. Incidentally, insecure hardware is a universal problem.