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Near the beginning of my career, I talked to a greybeard who harrumphed at me discussing something-or-other and said "computer security is an oxymoron". I thoug
by curuinor 16d ago
Near the beginning of my career, I talked to a greybeard who harrumphed at me discussing something-or-other and said "computer security is an oxymoron". I thought he was being too pessimistic, nowadays I realize he was right.
- drdaeman 16d agoHuman security. Computers are fine, they usually do exactly as they’re programmed.
- curuinor 16d agoWe don't care about the computers, humans are what society is for
- iAMkenough 16d agogetting the idea lately that society hates humans
- keybrd-intrrpt 16d agoCaring for humans hurts profits
- drdaeman 16d agoYes, of course. My point was that computers are as secure as human(s) who programmed them were careful and competent. Computer security is ultimately human knowledge and reasoning competence (plus time/money tradeoffs, if made willingly)
- UltraSane 16d agoReal computer security IS possible but takes a lot of effort by very skilled and dedicated people. You don't hear about bank mainframes getting hacked often.
- cogman10 16d agoIt makes systems harder to work with and new features slower to deploy and it requires you to make sure you stay on top of CVEs. That's overhead that businesses really hate paying as it's diverts software devs away from making new features.
- radarsat1 16d agoSoftware companies sure hate paying for the realities of developing and maintaining software. Sigh.
- FLeXMurphy 16d ago> You don't hear about bank mainframes getting hacked often. Who do you think employs the top-level criminals?
- pyrale 16d agoSure, but not in the IT service.
- cmiles74 16d agoSkilled and dedicated people and an organization dedicated to maintaining a consistent level of security. Maintaining both of these long term seems to be the challenge for many companies.
- wat10000 16d agoThat's too pessimistic. But it is a spectrum. You can't guarantee 100% success against 100% of potential attackers, but it still matters how easy it is to get into something. There's a pretty big difference between a Windows 95 machine hooked directly to the internet and something like a fully up-to-date iPhone. The iPhone is still hackable, but in practice it's so difficult that you're unlikely to be targeted unless you get the attention of a national government. It also requires actually caring about security and putting effort into it. These data breaches are usually systems where little attention was paid to security in the first place, and e.g. getting ahold of one user's password is enough to lose the game. Getting companies to care about security is really hard, but it does happen.
- john_strinlai 16d agoit's silly to think about computer security as binary secure/insecure.
- deadbabe 16d agoIf it’s not secure, by definition it’s insecure.
- john_strinlai 16d agothere is no perfectly secure system and defining everything as insecure is useless. outside of english class "secure" is relative and context-dependent, not binary.
- mitxela 15d agoIf he's grey enough, he might have predated effective cryptography.