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I sold your city a bridge that has an engineering flaw, such that it collapses when a purple van followed by an orange scooter drives over it. It also has thou
by neilv 3y ago
I sold your city a bridge that has an engineering flaw, such that it collapses when a purple van followed by an orange scooter drives over it.
It also has thousands of other serious engineering flaws, for other combinations of vehicle and foot traffic.
I keep the bridge blueprints secret, so that only I can make patches for the engineering flaws.
But I'll slowly trickle patches to some of the thousands of engineering flaws. (Mainly when they result in collapses to bridges I've built in other cities.)
Each time, I'll act like I'm doing you a favor, patching some of the bridge engineering flaws that I made negligently.
And I'll start bundling concessions and invasiveness with these patches.
The patch for the design flaw that makes the bridge collapse when green polka-dot truck drives over it-- comes with a garish billboard that I control.
The patch for the design flaw that makes the bridge collapse when a convertible with the windshield wipers on drives over it-- gratuitously requires that everyone driving over it lets me copy all their documents and photos.
It doesn't help that your city has some really jerky enemies, who like to make bridges collapse, and have lots of time on their hands. (Maybe you should've thought of that when selecting an engineering firm for your bridge.)
Somehow, I don't get jailed for shoddy bridge engineering, nor lose my bridge engineering license, nor even have to pay compensation for any of the collapses of bridges that I sold to other cities.
- grujicd 3y agoThis bridge is under 24/7 hacker attacks from all parts of the world. Some of them try to unscrew bolts, some dig around the foundation, some remove a brick or two here or there or cut suspension cables. In absence of these hackers bridge could be used without any modifications for any number of pink or orange vehicles. It supports any kind of traffic requested in specification. So it's not really a problem with any kind of regular use, it's a problem with huge number of adversaries who try to find a weak point and then actively exploit it. Flawled analogy aside, is there an example of an OS which is actively used on open internet and doesn't require security patches or bug fixes? Or any other significantly complex software? Why should we expect from Microsoft what was not achieved anywhere else in our industry? It could be that software development is more complex and more error prone than bridge building after all.
- neilv 3y agoThe analogy intentionally focused on the negligent engineering flaws that let anyone with a couple cans of spray paint trigger collapse. I didn't get to the somewhat trickier question of which parts can fail (due to time, use, nature, or sabotage) before collapse. Though I guess that might also be answered by the engineering design, and traceable to requirements and applicable standards.
- lolinder 3y agoThe analogy (being only an analogy) doesn't explain what negligent engineering flaws you're referring to, you simply imply they exist and expect everyone else to nod along. Are the security flaws in Windows notably worse than the patches that any other major OS needs? Or are there simply more of them that are discovered because a Windows vulnerability is a much juicier target?