Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I tried to measure this to show that you were wrong, but I was only able to show that you're right. How annoying.

The whole API feels wrong to me. It's breaking rule #1 of technology "You cannot solve a social problem with technology". In this case you have a social/economic problem which is crap code. You solve it with an economics solution - creative incentives not to produce crap code like boxes that keep popping up saying "App XYZ is using all your battery" and red-amber-green powermeter scores in app stores.

-- Alan Cox

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Quotes of the week

Posted May 29, 2010 17:50 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

It's breaking rule #1 of technology "You cannot solve a social problem with technology"

I can't find any validity in this rule. The only way it's true is if you make it a truism by defining a social problem as one with only a social solution.

Technology can probably help to solve just about any social problem, and has almost completely solved myriad social problems.

A bank vault is a technological solution to a social problem. So is encrypted telephone calls.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 29, 2010 22:10 UTC (Sat) by mlankhorst (subscriber, #52260) [Link] (1 responses)

So you can solve the problem of people's passwords with technology? Enforcing complicated passwords would result in a sticky note on their monitor ;)

Quotes of the week

Posted May 29, 2010 22:18 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

absolutely,

you have password safe applications, you have browser plugins that let you type one password and they hash it with the site name to create a unique password for that site, etc

if you are really paranoid, you could create a USB dongle that looked like a keyboard to the computer and stored your passwords, 'typing' them when you hit the right button on the USB device.

and everything above is only needed if you are dealing with systems that have to use a userid/password for authentication, technology has existed for decades that allows you to do challenge/response or one-time-passwords instead of a reusable password.

just because technology exists to solve a problem doesn't mean that people will use it, but this is an easy problem to address with technology, and it's actually solved better with technology than with any other method