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> Civil engineering students have it drilled into their heads that if they behave unethically or otherwise take unacceptable risks as an engineer they face jail

• Analemma_ 2y ago
  This entire comment boils down to "we can't be held accountable because it's soooo hard you guys", which isn't even convincing to me as someone in the industry and certainly won't be to someone outside it.
  • heyoni 2y ago
    What a shallow dismissal of a comment that doesn’t even claim that there shouldn’t be accountability.
    • mvdtnz 2y ago
      His dismissal is absolutely right though. Programmers have gotten way too used to waving their hands at the pubic and saying "gosh I know it's hard to understand but this stuff is so hard". Well no, sorry, there's not a single <= in place of a < that couldn't have been caught in a unit test.
      • eropple 2y ago
        You're right, in the case that it was known to be a problem. There are lots of places where the "<= or <" decision can be made, some long before some guy opens a text editor; in those cases, the unit test might not catch anything because the spec is wrong! A major difference between software development and engineering is that the requirements must be validated and accepted by the PE as part of the engineering process, and there are legal and cultural rails that exist to make that evaluation protected, and as part of that protection more independent--which I think everyone acknowledges is an imperfect independence, but it's a lot further along than software. To fairly impute liability to a software professional, that software professional needs to be protected from safety-conscious but profit-harmful decisions. This points to some mixture of legislation (and international legislation at that), along with collective bargaining and unionization. Which are both fine approaches by me, but they also seem to cause a lot of agita from a lot of the same folks who want more software liability.
        • wizzwizz4 2y ago
          > in those cases, the unit test might not catch anything because the spec is wrong! That's why you have three different, independent parties design everything important thrice, and compare the results. I'm serious. If you're not convinced this is necessary, just take a look at https://ghostwriteattack.com/riscvuzz.pdf https://ghostwriteattack.com/riscvuzz.pdf. (Your other suggestions are also necessary, and I don't think that would be sufficient.)
          • eropple 2y ago
            I think that's a great idea, and when I've been in a leadership role I've at least tried to have important things done at least twice. ;) And you're right, I was pretty much just outlining what might be called "a good start".
  • Ferret7446 2y ago
    If it's too hard for everyone to do, then yeah, it's too hard. At the end of the day, what matters is if you can, y'know, do the thing. And people just can't. > which isn't even convincing to me as someone in the industry Then you're confident that you can write bulletproof software? Prove it. Thankfully, as an industry we're pretty good at compromising software even if we can't write uncompromisable software. Since we're talking about serious liability, how about put up a multi million dollar bounty for any single bug found in a non-trivial program that you write?
  • 0xBDB 2y ago
    > This entire comment boils down to "we can't be held accountable because it's soooo hard you guys", which isn't even convincing to me as someone in the industry and certainly won't be to someone outside it. When that cargo ship hit the bridge in Baltimore and people were calling for bridges to be designed to take that kind of hit, I heard a lot of "that's sooo impossible you guys" from 'real' engineers. Because it apparently is. We can do (almost) anything, but we can't always do it for amounts people are willing to pay, where 'we' is everybody and 'willing to pay' means if you charge me what it would take to make it safe or secure, I'll redneck engineer it with none of that built in at all. People are not going to stop finding affordable ways to cross rivers or use web servers just because hard stuff is expensive.
• cyberax 2y ago
  This is all true. But we _do_ have known best practices that reduce the impact of bugs. A most trivial staged rollout would have caught this issue. And we're not talking about multi-week testing, even a few hours of testing would have been fine. Failure to do that rises to the level of gross negligence.
  • fire_lake 2y ago
    True but they are under time pressure to add definitions for emerging vulnerabilities.
• wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  > Contrast that to programming. A single "<" instead of "<=" could be the difference between totally fine and billions of dollars of damages. I fail to see the difference between a misplaced operator and a misplaced bolt (think Hyatt walkway collapse), both of which could have catastrophic consequences. Do you think the CAD software they use to perform the calculations is allowed have bugs simply because it's software? Maybe go back to entering code on punch cards if you're so fixated on the physical domain being the problem.
  • tedunangst 2y ago
    There's a reason we talk about the Hyatt walkway collapse but not the misplaced operator.
    • teddyh 2y ago
      It could happen. People have been predicting it for years, and many think that it is only a matter of time. For a vision from 1982 of how it could happen, see: <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA167 https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA167> Consider the following scenario. We are living in 1997, and the world of office automation has finally arrived. Powerful computers that would have filled a room in 1980 now fit neatly in the bottom of drawer of every executive’s desk, which is nothing more than heavy glass plate covering an array of keyboards, screens, and color displays. — The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist; Jacques Vallee, 1982
• ang_cire 2y ago
  To add onto this, the Pwnie Awards also go to people who get attacked, which is something that e.g. civil engineers certainly don't get blamed for (i.e. if a terrorist blows up their bridge). We would need a way to draw a liability line between an incident that involves a 3rd party attack, and one that doesn't, but things like SolarWinds even blur that line where there was blame on both sides. When does something become negligence, versus just the normal patching backlog that absolutely exists in every company? And why are people aiming the gun already at software engineers, rather than management or Product Architects? SE's are the construction workers at the bridge site. Architects and Management are responsible for making, reviewing, and approving design choices. If they're trying to shift that responsibility to SEs by not doing e.g. SCA or code reviews, that's them trying to avoid liability. Honestly, this reaction by the CEO is great for taking responsibility. Even if there's not legal liability, a lot of companies are still going to ditch CrowdStrike.
  • gopher_space 2y ago
    The trade is already a constant struggle with management over cutting corners and short term thinking. I’m not about to be blamed for that situation.
    • tiahura 2y ago
      Do you think the situation for real engineers is different?
      • gopher_space 2y ago
        Look, I wasn't expecting anyone to thank me for my service when I went back to school for COBOL and saved all of your paychecks circa '97 - '99, but I'm not going to sit here and be compared to those bucket-toting girder jockeys.
      • yodelshady 2y ago
        Yes. Because whilst the same pressures exist, there's a short number of engineers licensed to actually sign off on a project, and they're not going to jeopardise that license for you.
• btilly 2y ago
  The other side of it is this. By law, a licensed civil engineer must sign off on a civil engineering project. When doing so, the engineer takes personal legal liability. But the fact that the company needs an engineer to take responsibility means that if management tries to cut too many corners, the engineer can tell them to take a hike until they are willing to do it properly. Both sides have to go together. You have to put authority and responsibility together. In the end, we won't get better software unless programmers are given both authority AND responsibility. Right now programmers are given neither. If one programmer says no, they are just fired for another one who will say yes. Management finds one-sided disclaimers of liability to be cheaper than security. And this is not likely to change any time soon. Unfortunately the way that these things get changed is that politicians get involved. And let me tell you, whatever solution they come up with is going to be worse for everyone than what we have now. It won't be until several rounds of disaster that there's a chance of getting an actually workable solution.
  • kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Engineering uses repeatable processes that will ensure the final product works with a safety margin. There is no way to add a safety margin to code. Engineered solutions tend to have limited complexity or parts with limited complexity that can be evaluated on their own. No one can certify that a 1M+ line codebase is free from fatal flaws no matter what the test suite says.
    • chestertonsgate 2y ago
      Except nobody is asking for perfection here. Every time these disasters happen, people reflexively respond to any hint of oversight with stuff like this. And yet, the cockups are always hilariously bad. It's not "oh, we found a 34-step buffer overflow that happens once every century, it's "we pushed an untested update to eight million computers lol oops". If folks are afraid that we can't prevent THAT, then please tell me what software they've worked on so I can never use it ever.
    • jmb99 2y ago
      > There is no way to add a safety margin to code. This is, in my opinion, an incredibly naive take. There are currently decades of safety margin in basically all running code on every major OS and device, at every level of execution and operation. Sandboxing, user separation, kernel/userland separation, code signing (of kernels, kernel extensions/modules/drivers, regular applications), MMUs, CPU runlevels, firewalls/NAT, passwords, cryptography, stack/etc protections built into compilers, memory-safe languages, hardware-backed trusted execution, virtualization/containerization, hell even things like code review, version control, static analysis fall under this. And countless more, and more being developed and designed constantly. The “safety margin” is simply more complex from a classic engineering perspective and still being figured out, and it will never be as simple as “just make the code 5% more safe.” It will take decades, if not longer, to reach a point where any given piece of software could be considered “very safe” like you would any given bridge. But to say that “there is no way to add a safety margin to code” is oversimplifying the issue and akin to throwing your hands up in the air in defeat. That’s not a productive attitude to improve the overall safety of this profession (although it is unfortunately very common, and its commonality is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now). As the sibling comment says, no one (reasonable) is asking for perfection here, yet. “Good enough” right now generally means not making the same mistakes that have already been made hundreds/thousands/millions of times in the last 6 decades, and working to improve the state of the art gradually over time.
• exe34 2y ago
  did they take basic precautions like staged releases, code reviews, integration tests? if not, then it's literally the engineer equivalent of gross negligence and they do deserve to be sued to oblivion.
• NegativeK 2y ago
  Doctors, engineers, and lawyers aren't infinitely accountable to their equivalent of bugs. Structures still fail, patients die, and lawyers lose cases despite the reality of the crime. But they're liable when they fuck up beyond what their industry decides is acceptable. If Crowdstrike really wasn't testing the final build of their configuration files at all, then yeah -- that's obviously negligent given the potential impact and lack of customer ability to do staged rollouts. But if a software company has a bug that wasn't caught because they can't solve the halting problem, then no professional review board should fault the license holder. > we first have to find a way to separate innocent run-of-the-mill mistakes from gross negligence - and that's going to be extremely hard to formalize. I think we just (oh god -- no sentence with a just is actually that easy) need to actually look at other professional licenses to learn how their processes work. Because they've managed to incorporate humans analyzing situations where you can't have perfect information into a real process. But I don't think any of this will happen while software is still making absolute shit loads of money.
• spott 2y ago
  This is less complicated than you think. Civil engineering rules, safety margins and procedures have been established through the years as people died from their absence. The practice of civil engineering is arguably millennia old. Software is too new to have the same lessons learned and enacted into law. The problem isn’t that software doesn’t have the kind of practices and procedures that would prevent these kinds of errors, (see the space shuttle code for example), it is that we haven’t formalized their application into law, and the “terms of service” that protects software makers has so far prevented legal case law from ensuring liability if you don’t use them. Software engineering, compared to other engineering disciplines, has had a massive effect on the world in an incredibly short amount of time.
• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Nothing is ever designed to its absolute limit, and everything is built with a healthy safety margin. You calculate a bridge to carry bumper-to-bumper freight traffic, during a hurricane, when an earthquake hits - and then add 20%. Not entirely sure about whether a beam can handle it? Just size it up! Suddenly it's a lot less critical for your calculations to be exactly accurate That may have been true a couple hundred years ago. It's not been true for a couple decades now, because budget became a constraint even more important than physics, and believe it or not, you will have to justify every dollar that goes into your safety margin. That's where the accuracy of modern techniques matter: the more accurate your calculations (and the more consistent inputs and processes builders employ), the less material you can use to get even closer to the designed safety margin. Accidentally making a bridge too safe means setting money on fire, and we can't have that. That's the curse of progress. Better tools and techniques should allow to get more value - efficiency, safety, utility - for the same effort. Unfortunately, economic pressure makes companies opt for getting same or less[0] value for less effort. Civil engineering suffers from this just as much as software engineering does. -- [0] - Eventually asymptotically approaching the minimum legal quality standard.
  • vdqtp3 2y ago
    > Accidentally making a bridge too safe means setting money on fire, and we can't have that. There's a quote I've seen various versions of: anyone can build a bridge that is safe. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that is just barely safe.
• bsaul 2y ago
  I like the analogy. What would the equivalent of « adding safety margins » to a piece of critical code ? Building three of them with different technologies and making sure all return the same results ?
• darksim905 2y ago
  Do people actually believe when a company says something caused billions of dollars of damage? unless you can quantify that, much like law enforcement and articulate suspicion, it's pretty useless as a metric. If you can pull something out of your ass, what does it matter?
• jjav 2y ago
  > Contrast that to programming. A single "<" instead of "<=" could be the difference between totally fine and billions of dollars of damages. Disagree. This is true purely at the coding level, yes. Anyone could make a typo. If you're running a company that releases software with the risk exposure of crowdstrike, you better not have a release model where that typo goes straight to production. There need to be many layers of different kinds of testing. If carefully built, now there are many layers all of which have to fail for the bug to go live. You can bring down the failure probability down to negligible levels with enough layers of validation. > find a way to separate innocent run-of-the-mill mistakes from gross negligence - and that's going to be extremely hard to formalize. I don't think it's that hard. Not saying it is trivial, but it is well within the capability of the industry if we just focused a little bit on quality instead of 100% in profit. Standardize models and layers of testing coverage. If you implement them all then you're not being negligent and thus should not be liable. If you decide to skip them, liable.