Evil code

[xoft]

This is all fine as long as you have *const* data. The problem is, normally you don't. Quite a few programs have a global "buffer" object of a kind that they use for whatever buffering is needed, naturally it's stored in the writable data section. But on Windows, this still means code cannot execute from that location, so attacks cannot simply stuff data into that buffer and make it execute. On Linux, such an attack vector (oh so common for all the zero-day exploits) is perfectly viable. That, in my opinion, is very unsafe.