Notices by Olivier Forget (teleclimber@social.tchncs.de)

Learning about running untrusted JS:

- can't expose your other JS so use VM2
- but VM2 will probably leak and doesn't protect against while(true) so run in a container
- but then you read containers can't be trusted! Kernel exploits galore! For real security use full virtualization
- But KVM might have bugs too! The real way to go is bare metal.
- You're gonna airgap that, right?

I was a supporter of Sandstorm.io's kickstarter. Here's what I think now:

- They wanted to avoid the "empty app store" problem by letting you run existing apps. However apps had to be forked and modified to run on sandstorm. It can be quite hard to coerce a codebase to use Sandstorm's APIs and paradigms without introducing bugs. The result is many apps in the store were several versions behind and buggy.

(con't)

Sandstorm.io is kicking off its free users because it can't afford to host them. The cheapest paid plan is $9/month. For a consumer product, that's expensive. On par with music services and netflix, you'd have to get hours of use daily to justify. That's a high bar.

The solution is make it easier to self-host, but until that happens we need to figure out how to run services without losing money while charging $5 to $30 *per year*