2 ms·
It's unfortunate that he invoked the ridiculous broken window fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_wi
by zb 14y ago
It's unfortunate that he invoked the ridiculous broken window fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy) in the course of making his real point, which was that making the internet secure or reliable from the bottom up is prohibitively expensive and that security and reliability should be layered on top only where required.
- lostnet 14y agoHis "broken window fallacy" like point is an important one, but he poorly justified it. Stopping one rogue window breaker is admirable, stopping them universally has its disadvantages. The proposals for a secure network usually include avoiding the security confrontation through vetting users, extreme legal protection, etc. These solutions prevents us from maintaining 'glaziers' at all, which in turn leads to catastrophe when our global security solution fails. For example, if the FBI virtually eliminated viruses by chasing individual virus writers internationally with extreme laws and international agreement we would be even more vulnerable to the threat of state backed cyber attacks. It is really a "War of the Worlds" analogy.
- mseebach2 14y agoSo, the argument is that you can't stop all the criminal, rather than that it's undesirable to do so. As you wind down the population of criminals (at increasing marginal cost), you wind down the incentive to protect against crime, making the lives of the remaining criminals easier (further increasing the cost of apprehending them).
- bitJericho 14y agoYes. It is why the aliens in Independence Day lost the war.
- nathan_long 14y agoYes. There's a big difference between "crime is desirable" vs "there are unacceptable tradeoffs involved in eliminating it".