koenigdavidmj
Joined 17 years ago
Joined 17 years ago
(This is a perfectly ordinary HDHP/HSA plan through a large company that you’ve heard of.)
For every failed candidate, you are doing one system call, so roughly the same cost each way.
Now if you just do an execve, you’re just paying that cost. If you stat first, you pay the cost of another system call that doesn’t change the flow of your program at all (a nice way of saying you’re wasting time).
Unless stat is dramatically faster than exec on a nonexistent or non-executable path, there’s never a case where this is better.
Signal is the chief example of this kind of design. All they can provide a government is the creation date of someone’s account, and the last time they tried to check for messages. Neither message content nor metadata (who sent messages to whom) is accessible, assuming the app follows the design and the design doesn’t have defects.
Most average users are willing to trade the upside of the SaaS apps (sync is easy and pretty secure) for the downside (have to trust a third party like 1Password, that they won't send you a malicious client that slurps your master password).
We're technical, so we can use Password Store[0] and avoid the downside of the SaaS programs (have to trust a third party) while still having sync. If you're pissing off entities who might conceivably blackmail or hack 1Password, Password Store is the bare minimum.
[0] I'm not addressing that Password Store doesn't encrypt the sites it has logins for, just the fact that it doesn't require entering your master password in a web page.