> "We are not truly free if we do not have the freedom to make mistakes."
We don't build bridges that fall down and declare that we've done it out of the need to preserve freedom to experience gravity.
Software engineering is an engineering profession and building reliable software that works as intended is the goal. It's never been the goal to build breakable software... It's been a side effect of decades of engineering compromises to make a product buildable with the tools and resources available at the time. Tools and resources are better now, and it's high time we stopped building things that make it easy for an attacker to steal from your grandmother by compromising her bank's website.
I can assure you that systems will still be hackable and I can assure you that if they aren't, it will be of value to somebody to build a flexible at-your-own-risk system from first principles. The vast, vast majority of humanity is best served by having tools that do what they are designed to do.
I would think that someday I would stop getting shocked by things I see on Hacker News, but the "We need to keep using c++ because buffer overrun attacks are good actually" mentality is a new one on me.
I once thought like that. That was before I realised that corporate interests and those of the user increasingly don't align, and that any strength on their side equates to strength against you.
There needs to be a balance. Any extreme is dystopia. I'm just pushing back because I want to restore that balance.
It may equate to strength against someone; that someone isn't me.
Hackers are a non-protected minority. And they're generally smart enough to think their way out of the world being made harder to hack. For the rest of us, most changes making the world harder to hack are improvements. That's one of the reasons the marketplace keeps rewarding such changes.
We don't build bridges that fall down and declare that we've done it out of the need to preserve freedom to experience gravity.
Software engineering is an engineering profession and building reliable software that works as intended is the goal. It's never been the goal to build breakable software... It's been a side effect of decades of engineering compromises to make a product buildable with the tools and resources available at the time. Tools and resources are better now, and it's high time we stopped building things that make it easy for an attacker to steal from your grandmother by compromising her bank's website.
I can assure you that systems will still be hackable and I can assure you that if they aren't, it will be of value to somebody to build a flexible at-your-own-risk system from first principles. The vast, vast majority of humanity is best served by having tools that do what they are designed to do.
I would think that someday I would stop getting shocked by things I see on Hacker News, but the "We need to keep using c++ because buffer overrun attacks are good actually" mentality is a new one on me.