On Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:41:57 -0000, dawat_private (David Wagner) said: > Timothy L. Salus wrote: > >Therefore any code or system can be broken > > This is debateable, but more importantly, it is an dangerous meme. I'd rather have that meme on the loose than "It's secure because the vendor says it is". If people are convinced it's not secure, that would be a Very Big Win for personal privacy - people will start asking "Do I *want* to give this website/business/whatever my <whatever> number where it could be hacked?" I'd rather have that then a certain database vendor CEO say that his product is good enough(*) to run a national ID card database and be taken seriously. People understand that cars aren't crashproof and theftproof - but very few give up on cars as a result. Fortunately for society, most people realize that using seat belts, not driving drunk, keeping the car in good repair, and locking the doors when in bad neighborhoods vastly improve your chances. Now if we could just convince them the same thing about computers. -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech (*) On the other hand, nobody's product is good enough. We don't know how to build something that good. Think "J Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr", and ask how you can *possibly* write software to stop that.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 19 2002 - 21:23:13 PDT