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Most of the article, and the comment you're replying to, wasn't about hackers, though. It gave the example of people dying because the Therac machine or a Toyot

Most of the article, and the comment you're replying to, wasn't about hackers, though. It gave the example of people dying because the Therac machine or a Toyota car responded wrongly to non-malicious, normal user input, like a "bridge collapsing unprompted" in normal use.

Bartweiss 9y ago
Yeah, I agree about the article. I wouldn't offer this criticism to the main essay - fundamental bugs in critical systems are absolutely an engineering failure, at least in the sense that we should look for engineering practices to solve them. But with the post I responded to? I see this idea of "it's because engineers don't care, so give them liability" a lot, and frankly it's stupid. It neglects both cost-benefit differences and any interest in the question of hacking, and then goes on to pretend that you can fix bad systemic pressures by beating up the guys at the bottom. The difficulty of writing good code is not a function of how heavily you punish bad code. I flatly don't believe that the Therac bug would have been caught by personal liability for the bug; either the code would have been cancelled altogether to avoid liability or the bug would have gone on unabated. Realistically, criminal liability for lethal bugs mostly sounds like a way to drive talented devs away from high-stakes applications and leave those apps to be handled by people desperate enough to run the risk, or by international shops operating outside the reach of prosecution. I don't love the thought of a shop unwilling to use git because it creates personal responsibility. "Oh, we just pass code around on thumbdrives, I can't remember who wrote that critical line." I'd shrug and let the whole thing go, but the rumblings of "regulate software" keep getting stronger from a lot of directions. I don't really want to wake up in a decade and find out that degree requirements and expensive-but-useless licensing have become mandatory, and it feels like pretending bugs come from lazy devs is another snowflake in that avalanche.

Bartweiss 9y ago

Yeah, I agree about the article. I wouldn't offer this criticism to the main essay - fundamental bugs in critical systems are absolutely an engineering failure, at least in the sense that we should look for engineering practices to solve them. But with the post I responded to? I see this idea of "it's because engineers don't care, so give them liability" a lot, and frankly it's stupid. It neglects both cost-benefit differences and any interest in the question of hacking, and then goes on to pretend that you can fix bad systemic pressures by beating up the guys at the bottom. The difficulty of writing good code is not a function of how heavily you punish bad code. I flatly don't believe that the Therac bug would have been caught by personal liability for the bug; either the code would have been cancelled altogether to avoid liability or the bug would have gone on unabated. Realistically, criminal liability for lethal bugs mostly sounds like a way to drive talented devs away from high-stakes applications and leave those apps to be handled by people desperate enough to run the risk, or by international shops operating outside the reach of prosecution. I don't love the thought of a shop unwilling to use git because it creates personal responsibility. "Oh, we just pass code around on thumbdrives, I can't remember who wrote that critical line." I'd shrug and let the whole thing go, but the rumblings of "regulate software" keep getting stronger from a lot of directions. I don't really want to wake up in a decade and find out that degree requirements and expensive-but-useless licensing have become mandatory, and it feels like pretending bugs come from lazy devs is another snowflake in that avalanche.