[kstenerud]

To be fair to them, they lived in a different world. The 60s, 70s, and 80s were a very safe time in computers. Virii and "hacking" ranged from curiosities to pests, but nothing particularly serious.

Today we've gone well past document-embedded-virus payloads and XSS and infected USB sticks to log4j, rowhammer, and spectre. And we've barely even scratched the surface. Just wait until JSON and XML exploits (i.e. exploiting differences in decoder behavior) become common!

Bitrot is only going to get worse, and we're going to need to design our systems and formats and protocols explicitly with change in their DNA so that they can evolve to meet new threats.

[Moru]

Some of those classes of problems (log4j) are exactly why some people refuse to use external libraries or at least not pulling them in automatically for each build. It's not unexpected problems, it's expected problems that comes along. Everyone knows it will happen sooner or later but chooses to benefit from others work because that is how society grows. This however comes at a cost. And society is mostly prepared to pay the price because of the benefits.

Bitrot is also one of the things we have been fighting for a long time. That is why we have new file systems that scrubs the whole disk now and then, checking for bitrot and repairs while it's still possible.

Edit: Saw now that the article isn't even about bitrot. In my world bitrot is when data on the disk changes without anyone doing anything to it. A bit flips from 1 to 0 by no help from humans. This can be corrected automatically with checksums and backups. Against humans changing things they don't understand nothing can help you :-)