> someone finds a zero day for Otis equipment that lets you turn an elevator... I'm reminded of the EE-vs-CS joke about how to design a toaster[1]. Engineering

> someone finds a zero day for Otis equipment that lets you turn an elevator... I'm reminded of the EE-vs-CS joke about how to design a toaster[1]. Engineering-major rivalries aside, I've always liked it for its caution against over-engineering. For some things - such as elevators - we hit "good enough" a long time ago. I wonder if "non-programmability" will become a popular feature in the future, specifically to avoid these risks. Using non-Turing Complete "Little Languages"[2] or hardware that's fixed to a single circuit could help. Unfortunately, it's probably too late; we spent the last few decades putting CPUs into everything, and now we get to slowly find out how many security holes that additional complexity left us with. [1] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LittleLanguage http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LittleLanguage