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I don’t think it’s right to reject something outright. You should always give people the opportunity to show what they have. Then take a look at it and decide w

I don’t think it’s right to reject something outright. You should always give people the opportunity to show what they have. Then take a look at it and decide whether it’s good. A strong indicator for a scam is that they won’t show anything when asked for details. Then things should get rejected.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
I'm not suggesting a refusal to listen to the question. I'm observing that it's dangerous to accept the premise of a question that may move the goalposts, without first noticing the implicit premise or differing definition, and explaining why the premise or definition is faulty. Accepting the faulty premise moves the line to "so you just need to come up with the right technology", which then moves to "what's the most secure system you can build while still having a backdoor". The right answer to that is not "here's what we could hypothetically build", it's "by definition we cannot build a secure system with a backdoor, and also here are all the additional problems that a backdoor would introduce". By all means, fully listen to proposals, in order to understand the misconceptions and better address them. Or, in some cases, it's useful to listen to proposals to anticipate upcoming security threats and build a more robust security model. For instance, the potential threat of compromising CAs led to the invention of Certificate Transparency, which almost completely eliminates that possibility. We also need to get a lot better at rhetoric and PR.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  "so you just need to come up with the right technology" That line is not OK. If somebody wants something and you say you are not able to do it then it should be on them to prove you wrong. Reminds me of work BS. You say “it can’t be done in the timeframe”. VP response: “you are just not working hard enough”. It’s a nice way to manipulate the conversation. Technologists definitely should get better at messaging and arguing with bad faith actors.

JoshTriplett 7y ago

I'm not suggesting a refusal to listen to the question. I'm observing that it's dangerous to accept the premise of a question that may move the goalposts, without first noticing the implicit premise or differing definition, and explaining why the premise or definition is faulty. Accepting the faulty premise moves the line to "so you just need to come up with the right technology", which then moves to "what's the most secure system you can build while still having a backdoor". The right answer to that is not "here's what we could hypothetically build", it's "by definition we cannot build a secure system with a backdoor, and also here are all the additional problems that a backdoor would introduce". By all means, fully listen to proposals, in order to understand the misconceptions and better address them. Or, in some cases, it's useful to listen to proposals to anticipate upcoming security threats and build a more robust security model. For instance, the potential threat of compromising CAs led to the invention of Certificate Transparency, which almost completely eliminates that possibility. We also need to get a lot better at rhetoric and PR.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
"so you just need to come up with the right technology" That line is not OK. If somebody wants something and you say you are not able to do it then it should be on them to prove you wrong. Reminds me of work BS. You say “it can’t be done in the timeframe”. VP response: “you are just not working hard enough”. It’s a nice way to manipulate the conversation. Technologists definitely should get better at messaging and arguing with bad faith actors.