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Who will pay for it?Who will pay for it?Posted Oct 31, 2011 15:19 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: Who will pay for it? by khim Parent article: The embedded long-term support initiative
Relying on updates to fix security holes does not work! It hasn't worked to keep us secure over the past twenty years, what reason is there to suppose it will work for the next twenty?
You mention mobile phones, Blu-ray players and so on. Those are all parts of the software industry. When I said 'this would not be acceptable in any other industry' I was referring to industries other than software. It is not good enough to put up an unsound building and return to fix it later when flaws are discovered. (It does happen, but is rare and shaming for the architects and builders involved.) You can't sell a desk lamp with unsafe wiring and rely on asking people to take it back to the store later. Only in the software industry do we try to get away with such practices. And as you say, the market usually tolerates it.
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Who will pay for it? Posted Oct 31, 2011 16:38 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] In the building case: Correctness is feasible to achieve and validate, and the cost of remedying errors is relatively large. In the desk lamp case: Correctness is not merely feasible but trivial to achieve and validate. Software that does what there is currently perceived to be a demand for often lies somewhere between insanely hard and mathematically impossible to achieve and validate correctness of. The cost of remedying an error, on the other hand, is not strongly related to the severity of its consequences. Many disastrous software errors turn out to have trivial fixes. (And, of course, even if your software is provable, all you can prove is that it conforms to the provided specification. Proving that the specification is a correct statement of the requirements, or that the requirements were well-formed in the first place, is a separate problem.)
What are you talking about? Posted Oct 31, 2011 16:39 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Relying on updates to fix security holes does not work! On the contrary: it works very well indeed. The companies who use this approach survive and thrive. The companies who lost the wind and tried to fix all the bugs before shipment are history. You mention mobile phones, Blu-ray players and so on. Yup. Those are all parts of the software industry. Not even close. First mobile network started operating back in 1979, it was analogue and had nothing to do with software. First LD player was on sale year before that - and Bly-ray is it's direct descendant (from end-user POV). And first TVs were created even earlier: it was introduced back in 1928 and most definitely had nothing to do with software. Only in the software industry do we try to get away with such practices. Again: not true at all. Lots of industries use this approach too: mobile phones, credit cards, etc. Initially they had pathetic security but since they were convenient they were used anyway. Later, when frauds become a problem additional layers of security were added. The same happened with printed banknotes few centuries before. You can go back few thousands years (when first stamps and other similar tools were invented) - and see the very same picture. Again: special inks, papers and procedure and so on followed, not preceded. In fact where information is exchanged "rely on updates to fix security holes" is typical approach, not an exception. The only thing software introduced is "fast" updates. When you introduce new, more protected, banknote you must to this in slow, very spread-out manner. But when new software is created to patch vulnerability... you can push it in hurry. So no, I don't believe in "fix all the bugs before shipment" approach. It failed us for thousands of years - why do you think it can be fixed now?
Who will pay for it? Posted Oct 31, 2011 16:58 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
But we aren't talking about unsafe wiring in a desk lamp. Even if we were I'd argue that spending two hours travelling on the bus with a microwave (it caught fire spontaneously after ~8 months use) to get it replaced was a lot more hassle than any software update I've ever undertaken.
Your building example was better. But in fact it's completely routine to "snag" large office or industrial buildings.
When I helped take possession of a four story building in 1998 we were all issued with a sheet of orange stickers labelled "snag". Each problem we discovered was to be marked with a label, and added to a list maintained by the liaison to the building contractor. Some problems were corrected in a few days to our satisfaction, as well as if they'd been corrected during construction. Many were "bodged" so that they met the strict letter of the requirements, but were not really adequate (e.g. it's much cheaper to fiddle with the hinges on a door to make it close, for a few days until it settles again, than to buy and install a new door which fits properly). A few simply couldn't be fixed at all, no way around it without tearing down the building and beginning anew. Some orange stickers for those last problems remained as visible sores on the pristine new building until their adhesive failed years later.
If we added to the "snags" every conceivable way a resourceful and determined attacker could get into the building, we'd never have finished. What if they just drive a truck through the large glass frontage? What if they tailgate a legitimate employee? What if they pay someone to pull the fire alarm, dress as firemen, and just walk in?
Who will pay for it? Posted Nov 1, 2011 2:02 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> It is not good enough to put up an unsound building and return to fix it later when flaws are discovered. (It does happen, but is rare and shaming for the architects and builders involved.)
On the contrary, putting up a building with serious "bugs" is exceedingly common. Where it matters most (building will fall down), extra care is taken to make sure it won't fail in that way, but, for all the other ways a building can be broken, it's quite common for a new building to in fact *be* broken in all of those ways.
E.g. leaking excessive amounts of water, light switches are in stupid places that don't make any sense, HVAC doesn't work right (hot/cold areas), architect decided not to put stairwells in elevator lobby (but rather halfway across the building in a supposed-to-be-locked area), so it turns out it's illegal to actually lock the entrance to the floor from the (public) elevator lobby, etc...
Who will pay for it? Posted Nov 2, 2011 8:15 UTC (Wed) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Writing bug-free software, does not work. As in, literally nobody has figured out how to do it, not even with near-infinite budgets for near-trivial computations.
Even those situations where we use the very strictest of quality-controls, and as a result end up paying orders of magnitude more than we would with "normal" software, we still get banal, -stupid- bugs like the Mars Climate Orbiter doing lithobraking due to one software-module using imperial units rather than metric like the rest of the software. (i.e. bugs not unlike those typical of normal off-the-shelf software)
In most lines of bussiness, simply *trying* to do software like that, would guarantee bankruptcy. There's a reason things are done the way things are done.
Who will pay for it? Posted Nov 3, 2011 9:53 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
> It is not good enough to put up an unsound building and return to fix it
> later when flaws are discovered. (It does happen, but is rare and shaming > for the architects and builders involved.)
I wish you lots of luck if/when you'll build your first house and that fantasy will be rather rudely destroyed.
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