Why Software Isn't Liable

Almost everyone with a device (computer, phone, tablet) connected to the Internet worries about security or performance impact. Anti-virus packages can only help so much: they are engaged in an endless evolutionary war with the viruses: each side evolves, adapts and improvises, but neither ever wins the war for good.
Jane Chong asked the question as to why software companies are not held liable for the quality of what they sell. Why were there vulnerabilities that could be exploited? Shouldn’t it be the company’s responsibility to test it thoroughly? In exasperation, she writes:
“Dazzled by what software makes possible—the highs—we have embedded into our lives a technological medium capable of bringing society to its knees, but from which we demand virtually no quality assurance.”
She denounces the software industry’s response that bad things happen because users often “fail to implement adequate security”.

I don’t know if Chong understands the first thing about software, but Steven Sinofsky sure does. He points out that programming languages are just tools. It is humanly impossible for anyone to anticipate and prevent every conceivable misuse of the tool. Or to use an analogy:
“I used a screwdriver as a pry bar.  I used a wrench as a hammer.”
Also, in today’s world, if anyone identifies any vulnerability, the impact happens on an “Internet scale” at warp speed. Add to that, programmers are “always going to push the limits of what they do”, sometimes to show off, at other times, for malicious purposes. As Sinofsky says:
“There is simply no way to prevent clever uses anymore than you can prevent me from using my screwdriver as a pry bar.”

Removing all features that can be misused would just be throwing the baby out with the bath water:
“There will be cost and unintended side effects of those actions.”
So can nothing be done at all? All hope isn’t lost, because modern platforms, especially the mobiles ones, are better than their predecessors:
“We’re not there yet collectively as an industry on balancing the extensibility of platforms and the desire for safety, security, performance, predictability, and more.  Modern platforms are a huge step in a better direction.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more