Kernel security, year to date

Face it. You're not going to get 'general public outrage' about *any*
computer security problem unless it causes mass death, and even then it
might not happen. Security is a boring overhead to most people, so any
scheme which attempts to change anything in the security domain by
attempting to incur 'general public outrage' is guaranteed to fail.

(What's more, it's tiresome. Fixing the damn bugs is surely more
worthwhile than complaining endlessly about them.)

(Also: compared to a lot of code in critical positions, the security of
the kernel is pretty damn good. A while back I looked for security holes
in the product I work on in my day job, which throws many millions of
dollars around in the financial markets on a daily basis and is often
intentionally (!) left exposed to the Internet at large. I gave up when I
realised that the security hole density was approximately one per twenty
lines, generally enormous buffer overruns, trusting of untrustworthy data
from completely unauthenticated external sources, and SQL injection
attacks up the wazoo. I tried to convince my coworkers not to introduce
more such bugs, but nobody else considered any of these things
problematic. You can always trust external data, can't you? And if bad
stuff comes in, well, it's not *your* fault. Blame the attacker.)