Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 29, 2023 7:45 AM

@ Peter A., ALL,

Re : Nobody’s infallible

All humans err that is accepted by most, but as the old *nix version of the joke has it,

“It takes a computer to realy ‘fsck’ things up…”

It happens increasingly because most people forget that computers are a product of man kind (A point a UK Law Lord made agaonst British Gas who were endlessly harassing a lady, and when challenged used the old “The computer says” excuse).

As engineers we have spent millions of man hours of the past half century or more trying to make the “electronics” more reliable and found that we just ran into other problems like metastability and little gifts from space passing through. So we went in other directions using parity, redundacy and even word puzzels from several millennia ago.

The problem now is that we’ve made things so reliable in some senses that two things have happened,

1, We’ve become overly reliant.
2, We nolonger have ephemerality.

As a result society has become an almost alien place to those born before the transistor radio took over from the valve/tube radios.

We now have got to the point where “unreliability” has become a necessity for economic growth…

It’s not much talked about but the history of light bulbs and their manufacturing and the set up of cartels to deliberately stop reliability to “maintain market growth” tells a lot. For instance we’ve gone from tungstan filaments to LED’s yet as if by magic the reliability is still around 2000 hours. Any electronics engineer can tell you that it should be around 500,000 hours… So why is it not? The simple answer is the manufactures design new LED bulbs to “burn out” by using parts in a way to make them fail, so they can keep selling light bulbs…

Whilst people might be shocked by this, they don’t think about the flip side… Part of the reason we can buy light bulbs is that the cost of manufacture is sufficiently low. If the reliability went up to 500,000 hours that would be an equivalent life time of ~250years no manufacturing system running at reasonable cost to the consumer could survive due to the cripling effect of “fixed costs” and similar…

However in computing we have kind of gone over the reliability hump and the only reason we have computers still manufactured is a little strange (remember it’s actually a deflationary market as far as basic economics is concerned).

Whilst I do use more modern OS’s for what I need to do –some unique to me– I still use Win XP and Office 95 to “prettify” “text” for other peoples “expectations” (though banging it out in crude HTML in an editor works more than well enough).

Likewise I use CSV and still MicroSoft’s “Rich Text Format”(RTF). Even though RTF has not had any love from Microsoft or others for over a decade and a half now. I even still use the earlier file format of “WordStar” and happily chug along in WS4.x on Microsoft MS-DOS 5 on some of my more “gentrified” computers.

Which is why your mention of ‘vi’ and the fact it does not do some of the dumb things more modern developers and programers “build in”. Whilst I have used and still do use ‘ed’ I never realy took to vi as a work tool as WordStar “key-bindings” became the default in early IDE’s in DOS (and can still be found in supported use).

The point is vi has survived by the “snow ball down a hill” process and as such became a “standard” and still is. Over time many of it’s faults have been not just fixed but effectively expunged from nearly all “living memory” and learning it a “right of passage”. What others mainly don’t realise is that it encorages a “seperation” that ends up in the way people think and do things at an almost mechanical level. That is vi tends to make you put your thoughts in order so your work flows, rather than keep pecking at it for visual style… That in turn encorages more structured thinking, which works it’s way up and tends to produce higher productivity in people it suits. So I suspect vi is going to still be in regular use long after both of us nolonger care 😉

But the flip side of “hand holding” that most “productivity tools” do, is they keep users in kindergarten mode, that they don’t grow out of during their teens and twenties, and by the time they are in their thirties for most “It ain’t going to happen”.

So they don’t learn why the scissors are not realy usefull because of all the protection around the blades. They just accept the protection and don’t progress to “craftsmenship” or understanding of the dangers of “edged tools”…

With computers it’s now become so hard to not have everything kept, that law enforcment and the legal proffession see “computers” and other “ICT tools” as the way to an easy success…

It also means that certain types of “crime” become almost ridiculously simple as well… Hence ID theft, impersonation and even scapegoating become easy for those that “know the system” and virtually impossible to comprehend for those not “in the know” which is by far the majority by a very very long way…