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Because you'll be out-competed if you aim for high degrees of 'faultlessness.' Your competitor skips your sound engineering practices, gets to market faster, an

Because you'll be out-competed if you aim for high degrees of 'faultlessness.' Your competitor skips your sound engineering practices, gets to market faster, and "wins." Two years later, they get breached, 10 million unhashed passwords leaked, and yet they have such a stranglehold on the market that the breach barely affects their bottom line. Compare that with say, the aerospace engineering industry, where putting out a faulty airplane that crashes, brings with it lawsuits, damages from victims, huge hikes in insurance premiums, and higher demand from consumers for your competitors' models.

blfr 9y ago
Losing a plane full of people is a tragedy. Losing a few million passwords is not. Actually, my email addresses and passwords have been leaked many times and it's not a big deal. Makes a barely noticeable difference to my spam folder. These are very different levels of risk. Of course they are approached differently.
- katastic 9y ago
  > Losing a few million passwords is not. Just because you've never been adversely affected doesn't mean other people's lives aren't ruined. What about people who have unsavory things leaked about them? (Gay people still in the closet from their ultra-conservative families? Religious people who leave their faith?) What about people who are blackmailed? What about women's private nude pictures? I think they care whether their accounts are compromised. We have privacy for a reason. It's valuable. And the more we depend on the internet for our lives, placing our private actions (nudity, conversations with our closest friends and family) onto the internet, the more valuable it is to hack and breach it. The more our society values witchhunts, the more valuable it is to breach security to find new savory details to feed those witchhunts. Imagine if you took an innocent photo of your toddler, naked, in the bathtub. And then found out it was being traded on a pedo ring. You'd feel pretty violated. And then you found out your home address and your child's school address was posted online there. You'd feel pretty scared at that point.
  - blfr 9y ago
    The most contrived examples you come up with are still vastly better outcomes than 150 people perishing in a plane crash. The stakes are just much, much lower.
    - pfranz 9y ago
      We see class actions and government intervention over things like wristbands that give a small percentage of people rashes, antennas that perform poorly if you hold your phone in a certain away, or devices that fail just out of warranty. I think the difference is they're extensions of laws for more egregious things like; things that electrocute you, things that give you cancer, or things that explode. (I'm sure another factor is that physical things have been sold for much longer than digital things) Since digital things don't have those catastrophic examples, the other violations don't have the same protections.
    - manicdee 9y ago
      These are real examples, and mortality is not the only risk humans wish to avoid.
      - katastic 9y ago
        I know. Just because you're not dead, doesn't mean you're not affected in a way that matters to you.
godelmachine 9y ago
A small bug in software that was used in Challenger brought down the entire space shuttle, killing all of its crew.
- erik_seaberg 9y ago
  Challenger was destroyed by a disintegrating solid rocket. Given that a solid rocket cannot be shut down, what kind of software change could ever save them?
  - pkroll 9y ago
    Solid rockets that detach. So, at least in theory, could have ejected the rockets. Or detached the shuttle from the whole tank and land. If you can detect the rocket's about to blow, of course.
    - erik_seaberg 9y ago
      Ditching the tank might help, but I wonder whether the control surfaces are quick enough to prevent tumbling in the hypersonic airstream.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I believe you are thinking of NASA's Mars lander. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288 http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288 The ExoMars mission apparently had a software bug that crashed the lander. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2016/10/26/software-glitch-may-have-crashed-exomars-lander/#69c418c87426 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2016/10/26/soft...

blfr 9y ago

Losing a plane full of people is a tragedy. Losing a few million passwords is not. Actually, my email addresses and passwords have been leaked many times and it's not a big deal. Makes a barely noticeable difference to my spam folder. These are very different levels of risk. Of course they are approached differently.

katastic 9y ago
> Losing a few million passwords is not. Just because you've never been adversely affected doesn't mean other people's lives aren't ruined. What about people who have unsavory things leaked about them? (Gay people still in the closet from their ultra-conservative families? Religious people who leave their faith?) What about people who are blackmailed? What about women's private nude pictures? I think they care whether their accounts are compromised. We have privacy for a reason. It's valuable. And the more we depend on the internet for our lives, placing our private actions (nudity, conversations with our closest friends and family) onto the internet, the more valuable it is to hack and breach it. The more our society values witchhunts, the more valuable it is to breach security to find new savory details to feed those witchhunts. Imagine if you took an innocent photo of your toddler, naked, in the bathtub. And then found out it was being traded on a pedo ring. You'd feel pretty violated. And then you found out your home address and your child's school address was posted online there. You'd feel pretty scared at that point.
- blfr 9y ago
  The most contrived examples you come up with are still vastly better outcomes than 150 people perishing in a plane crash. The stakes are just much, much lower.
  - pfranz 9y ago
    We see class actions and government intervention over things like wristbands that give a small percentage of people rashes, antennas that perform poorly if you hold your phone in a certain away, or devices that fail just out of warranty. I think the difference is they're extensions of laws for more egregious things like; things that electrocute you, things that give you cancer, or things that explode. (I'm sure another factor is that physical things have been sold for much longer than digital things) Since digital things don't have those catastrophic examples, the other violations don't have the same protections.
  - manicdee 9y ago
    These are real examples, and mortality is not the only risk humans wish to avoid.
    - katastic 9y ago
      I know. Just because you're not dead, doesn't mean you're not affected in a way that matters to you.

godelmachine 9y ago

A small bug in software that was used in Challenger brought down the entire space shuttle, killing all of its crew.

erik_seaberg 9y ago
Challenger was destroyed by a disintegrating solid rocket. Given that a solid rocket cannot be shut down, what kind of software change could ever save them?
- pkroll 9y ago
  Solid rockets that detach. So, at least in theory, could have ejected the rockets. Or detached the shuttle from the whole tank and land. If you can detect the rocket's about to blow, of course.
  - erik_seaberg 9y ago
    Ditching the tank might help, but I wonder whether the control surfaces are quick enough to prevent tumbling in the hypersonic airstream.
Clubber 9y ago
I believe you are thinking of NASA's Mars lander. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288 http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288 The ExoMars mission apparently had a software bug that crashed the lander. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2016/10/26/software-glitch-may-have-crashed-exomars-lander/#69c418c87426 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2016/10/26/soft...