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The analogy between IT security and car safety is really insightful. However, it's also interesting that cars are two to three orders of magnitude less safe tha

The analogy between IT security and car safety is really insightful. However, it's also interesting that cars are two to three orders of magnitude less safe than rail and air travel, respectively, in terms of injuries and fatalities per passenger mile. Maybe we should be thinking about how to make using computers as safe as air travel, rather than as safe as car travel.

morgante 10y ago
The utility of the car metaphor is that both computers and cars have to work safely for non-professional users. Cars are overwhelmingly driven by people whose job isn't to drive a car and computers are used by non-professional users all the time. This is a critical point, as it's a lot harder to enforce safety practices or education on people who don't have a professional obligation to follow those practices. You have to design your systems to work for people who will do everything wrong. In terms of mitigating severity from crashes, cars are far ahead of airplanes. Of course, air travel is a great area to draw on for security when it comes to professional computer users (developers, sysadmins, etc.). A lot of the practices which have improved safety in air travel (automation, checklists, blameless post mortems) are directly applicable to computing safety when it comes to people whose job it is.
yourapostasy 10y ago
Why are different modes of travel's safety measured in passenger mile instead of passenger hours? To measure utility of distance traveled, it makes sense, but passenger mile doesn't reveal how safe it is per hour that I sit in a particular vehicle (train, plane, car, etc.).
- morgante 10y ago
  > Why are different modes of travel's safety measured in passenger mile instead of passenger hours? Because it's really the only sensible way to compare different forms of transportation. Imagine a teleportation device with an accidental death rate of 1 per 10 trillion miles. But it only takes 2ms to operate (regardless of distance), so the death rate measured in hours would be horrible. Compare that to covered wagons. Per mile, they're quite dangerous—going on a long trip in one might mean a 1 in 10 chance of death. But they're also extremely slow. So measuring death in terms of hours would make them look safe. From a safety perspective, which would you rather use?

morgante 10y ago

The utility of the car metaphor is that both computers and cars have to work safely for non-professional users. Cars are overwhelmingly driven by people whose job isn't to drive a car and computers are used by non-professional users all the time. This is a critical point, as it's a lot harder to enforce safety practices or education on people who don't have a professional obligation to follow those practices. You have to design your systems to work for people who will do everything wrong. In terms of mitigating severity from crashes, cars are far ahead of airplanes. Of course, air travel is a great area to draw on for security when it comes to professional computer users (developers, sysadmins, etc.). A lot of the practices which have improved safety in air travel (automation, checklists, blameless post mortems) are directly applicable to computing safety when it comes to people whose job it is.

yourapostasy 10y ago

Why are different modes of travel's safety measured in passenger mile instead of passenger hours? To measure utility of distance traveled, it makes sense, but passenger mile doesn't reveal how safe it is per hour that I sit in a particular vehicle (train, plane, car, etc.).

morgante 10y ago
> Why are different modes of travel's safety measured in passenger mile instead of passenger hours? Because it's really the only sensible way to compare different forms of transportation. Imagine a teleportation device with an accidental death rate of 1 per 10 trillion miles. But it only takes 2ms to operate (regardless of distance), so the death rate measured in hours would be horrible. Compare that to covered wagons. Per mile, they're quite dangerous—going on a long trip in one might mean a 1 in 10 chance of death. But they're also extremely slow. So measuring death in terms of hours would make them look safe. From a safety perspective, which would you rather use?