The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
theatlantic.com
The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
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Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#2At last, we've found the counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#3I wish this article were more particular about what cryptologists are doing wrong? What exactly could they have done instead? Without that info, it just seems like pointing a finger at cryptologists and saying, “This is your job! Do something!”
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#4At last, we've found the counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
There are many counter-examples. The important part isn’t that the answer is “no”, as the Law states, but that the story is tired enough to need a question in its headline in the first place. Andrew Marr’s explanation focusses especially on this aspect of the Law: “A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.” He makes a few assumptions, but I think the overall takeaway of “question mark equals clickbait” rings true.
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#5I wish this article were more particular about what cryptologists are doing wrong? What exactly could they have done instead? Without that info, it just seems like pointing a finger at cryptologists and saying, “This is your job! Do something!”
Rogaway wrote an companion essay for his invited talk that is rather accessible: http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#6At last, we've found the counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
There are many counter-examples. The important part isn’t that the answer is “no”, as the Law states, but that the story is tired enough to need a question in its headline in the first place. Andrew Marr’s explanation focusses especially on this aspect of the Law: “A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or…
the title has been changed to include a ? when posting here it seems, (or they changed it on theatlantic.com). Nevertheless your comment about ? equalling clickbait really made me think.
Edit: ok I just realized that the summary at the top was used as the title when posting here. I don't feel there is anything wrong with this.
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#7In short: no. This is a political problem that must be solved by laws that people push for. People have been supporting surveillance state or apathetic. Hence, it's winning and their combo of police power + secrecy + immunity is stronger than crypto.
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#8In short: no. This is a political problem that must be solved by laws that people push for. People have been supporting surveillance state or apathetic. Hence, it's winning and their combo of police power + secrecy + immunity is stronger than crypto.
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Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#9In short: no. This is a political problem that must be solved by laws that people push for. People have been supporting surveillance state or apathetic. Hence, it's winning and their combo of police power + secrecy + immunity is stronger than crypto.
Wrong. The surveillance state does not follow laws, and it has all the dirt it could ever want on politicians. Laws are not a solution here. The first rule of security is "don't trust the network". Computer scientists and developers who build systems that require users to trust the network are uniquely culpable. This is an unpopular opinion here because many of us would like to continue collecting hefty paychecks while washing our hands of any responsibility for our actions.
Re: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
#10In short: no. This is a political problem that must be solved by laws that people push for. People have been supporting surveillance state or apathetic. Hence, it's winning and their combo of police power + secrecy + immunity is stronger than crypto.
Strongly disagree.
Legal protection provides a recourse after everything happens. Technological measures don't let it happen in the first place. Or, well, to be more correct - make it significantly harder to happen.
Consider: we can send all our email as non-enveloped postcards and rely on the laws that our correspondence privacy is protected. But for some reason we don't. Why we still send send out our Internet correspondence completely unprotected is beyond me.
It is important that we have laws, so we can get a legal recourse if something goes wrong. But it's extremely naive to think that no one would violate those laws just because they are in place.
Even more, I believe that technological measures must come first. Because if a law comes first, the public relaxes, thinks they're safe now, and few bother about actually putting a lock on the door.