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by zappb 130 days ago
This vastly overstates both the competence of spy agencies and of software engineers in general. When it comes to memory unsafe code, the potential for exploits is nearly infinite.
1 comments

> overstates both the competence of spy agencies

Stuxnet was pretty impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

It was also not a bug to be exploited.

It was a complicated product that many people worked in order to develop and took advantage of many pre-existing vulnerabilities as well knowledge of complex and niche systems in order to work.

Yeah, Stuxnet was the absolute worst of the worst the depths of its development we will likely truly never know. The cost of its development we will never truly know. It was an extremely highly, hyper targeted, advanced digital weapon. Nation states wouldn't even use this type of warfare against pedophiles.
Stuxnet was discovered because a bug was accidently introduced during an update [0]. So I think it speaks more to how vulnerabilities and bugs do appear organically. If an insanely sophisticated program built under incredibly high security and secrecy standards can accidently push an update introducing a bug, then why wouldn't it happen to Apple?

[0] https://repefs.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/a-comprehensive-anal...