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> Professional engineers working on buildings aren't liable for someone who decides to take a bulldozer to it to find its weakness, (...) Actually, they are.

> Professional engineers working on buildings aren't liable for someone who decides to take a bulldozer to it to find its weakness, (...) Actually, they are. Engineers are tasked with designing safe structures taking into account a bunch of failure modes, not only those that involve safety but also usability. These failure modes are even covered in standards, and engineers who fail to design projects which are safe under these scenarios are held liable both civil and criminally.

dchftcs 4y ago
There's a limit to these things. Residential houses are not designed to withstand machine gun fires. Or a novel chemical, or even just an uncommon but nasty one.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  > "Residential houses are not designed to withstand machine gun fires." If machine gun fire were a daily occurrence for residential houses, they would be. Every other common occurrence that occurs to residential houses, whether it's fire hazards, snow load on the roof, earthquake protection, etc. is part of the design consideration for residential houses. The fact that software _predictably_ gets attacked when placed online is exactly what means that developers can't shrug their shoulders and pretend it's an unforeseen event.
  - tr_user 4y ago
    Except machine gun fire is consistent. Say you were to plan against guerilla warfare with various arms and various tactics that evolve each year because there's an arms marketplace. Could you? How often do the people who pay for the software plan for that in their budgeting? Supposed I were to say this software has been pentested before release and it'll cost this much extra. How many people are paying for that? How many people will pay for it to be pentested each year for new vulnerabilities?
    - jitl 4y ago
      This is more like missing doors/door locks than machine gun fire.
      - everforward 4y ago
        They're not missing doors and locks; the auth layer exists, but it's not without weakness. Most residential doors I've seen can't even stop someone with a credit card or metal shim, unless they have and actually use the deadbolt. The vast majority can be picked with ease if you have experience (and hackers typically do). You can also just check windows, since most people don't lock them. If you don't have to leave the door intact, there's a billion ways to get in. You can ram through the door, since they're not terribly thick. You can drill out the locks. You can saw through the hinges and/or the bolts. If you really don't care, any number of guns can remove the locks or hinges. An angle grinder will neatly handle any safe you're likely to find inside.
  - dchftcs 4y ago
    When you're deploying something to the warzone, there are many unknown unknowns that affect the outcome. Things get predictably attacked and the defense can get unpredictably destroyed. Firearms and tactics evolve over time and very few things can really be blamed on the engineer. The rules for PE are also based on evidence of due diligence on known problems rather than absolute liability, because nobody knows everything that could happen, and can't cover all possible failures. You should read up on how tanks are destroyed or stopped in inventive ways in guerilla warfare, such as in the ongoing Ukraine conflict (it's not just failure of maintenance) or in Vietnam war. I also don't understand why you could selectively skip the part about novel chemicals.
dghlsakjg 4y ago
I suspect the point is more that PEs and architects are supposed to deal with a known set of threat models, most of which ARE NOT nation states deploying dedicated teams to getting inside the building. We don't harden every building for military attack. Software, on the other had is expected to stand up to being exposed to nation state level threats that we know about, as well those in the future that we don't know about. We can't get mad that Sony was hacked by North Korea in the same way that we wouldn't be mad at the engineers if the studio building burnt down after being bombed by the North Koreans.
- dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
  > We don't harden every building for military attack. We might, if military attacks were as commonplace, untraceable, and unpunished as online attacks.
  - tr_user 4y ago
    We might if people paid for it.
cafard 4y ago
Were the designers of the Moehne Dam hauled into court after the RAF destroyed it?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
randomdata 4y ago
The buildings in the path of Killdozer[1] didn't stand up. The machine penetrated them with ease. Are the engineers who designed them in jail now, or what? Or was it understood that designing a building to not give way to the fate of a rogue bulldozer was not a necessary feature of the original design because at some point you have to accept that a determined enough human will find a way in no matter what? Even if you do design it to withstand a bulldozer, the determined human will just bring in something more powerful. The determined human is clever and unpredictable, which doesn't realistically fit the engineering model of working within known constraints. I would offer that there is good reason why building security (e.g. police) is its own profession, not a traditional engineering discipline. [1] https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/this-man-barely-escaped-killdozers-path-now-hes-written-a-book-about-marvin-heemeyer/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/this-man-barely-escaped-kil...

dchftcs 4y ago

There's a limit to these things. Residential houses are not designed to withstand machine gun fires. Or a novel chemical, or even just an uncommon but nasty one.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> "Residential houses are not designed to withstand machine gun fires." If machine gun fire were a daily occurrence for residential houses, they would be. Every other common occurrence that occurs to residential houses, whether it's fire hazards, snow load on the roof, earthquake protection, etc. is part of the design consideration for residential houses. The fact that software _predictably_ gets attacked when placed online is exactly what means that developers can't shrug their shoulders and pretend it's an unforeseen event.
- tr_user 4y ago
  Except machine gun fire is consistent. Say you were to plan against guerilla warfare with various arms and various tactics that evolve each year because there's an arms marketplace. Could you? How often do the people who pay for the software plan for that in their budgeting? Supposed I were to say this software has been pentested before release and it'll cost this much extra. How many people are paying for that? How many people will pay for it to be pentested each year for new vulnerabilities?
  - jitl 4y ago
    This is more like missing doors/door locks than machine gun fire.
    - everforward 4y ago
      They're not missing doors and locks; the auth layer exists, but it's not without weakness. Most residential doors I've seen can't even stop someone with a credit card or metal shim, unless they have and actually use the deadbolt. The vast majority can be picked with ease if you have experience (and hackers typically do). You can also just check windows, since most people don't lock them. If you don't have to leave the door intact, there's a billion ways to get in. You can ram through the door, since they're not terribly thick. You can drill out the locks. You can saw through the hinges and/or the bolts. If you really don't care, any number of guns can remove the locks or hinges. An angle grinder will neatly handle any safe you're likely to find inside.
- dchftcs 4y ago
  When you're deploying something to the warzone, there are many unknown unknowns that affect the outcome. Things get predictably attacked and the defense can get unpredictably destroyed. Firearms and tactics evolve over time and very few things can really be blamed on the engineer. The rules for PE are also based on evidence of due diligence on known problems rather than absolute liability, because nobody knows everything that could happen, and can't cover all possible failures. You should read up on how tanks are destroyed or stopped in inventive ways in guerilla warfare, such as in the ongoing Ukraine conflict (it's not just failure of maintenance) or in Vietnam war. I also don't understand why you could selectively skip the part about novel chemicals.

dghlsakjg 4y ago

I suspect the point is more that PEs and architects are supposed to deal with a known set of threat models, most of which ARE NOT nation states deploying dedicated teams to getting inside the building. We don't harden every building for military attack. Software, on the other had is expected to stand up to being exposed to nation state level threats that we know about, as well those in the future that we don't know about. We can't get mad that Sony was hacked by North Korea in the same way that we wouldn't be mad at the engineers if the studio building burnt down after being bombed by the North Koreans.

dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
> We don't harden every building for military attack. We might, if military attacks were as commonplace, untraceable, and unpunished as online attacks.
- tr_user 4y ago
  We might if people paid for it.

cafard 4y ago

Were the designers of the Moehne Dam hauled into court after the RAF destroyed it?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

randomdata 4y ago

The buildings in the path of Killdozer[1] didn't stand up. The machine penetrated them with ease. Are the engineers who designed them in jail now, or what? Or was it understood that designing a building to not give way to the fate of a rogue bulldozer was not a necessary feature of the original design because at some point you have to accept that a determined enough human will find a way in no matter what? Even if you do design it to withstand a bulldozer, the determined human will just bring in something more powerful. The determined human is clever and unpredictable, which doesn't realistically fit the engineering model of working within known constraints. I would offer that there is good reason why building security (e.g. police) is its own profession, not a traditional engineering discipline. [1] https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/this-man-barely-escaped-killdozers-path-now-hes-written-a-book-about-marvin-heemeyer/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/this-man-barely-escaped-kil...