Living with the surveillance state

Posted Nov 4, 2013 23:04 UTC (Mon) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by bakterie
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

> You strive for a formal description that is "obviously" correct to a human,

Unfortunately '"obviously" correct' is in no way the same as really correct. '"obviously" correct' is akin to a secure implementation of cryptography: not yet broken.

Living with the surveillance state

Posted Nov 5, 2013 8:27 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, maybe I, as a purported software engineer, should learn more about this arena. When I last looked it seemed like a very large amount of effort for a fairly narrow improvement in reliability.

Of course we also put a lot of time and effort trying to make our code coverity-clean, and that seems to be also a fairly narrow band of improvement. I guess I suspect that for hundreds of thousands of lines of code that trying to make a provably correct model isn't likely to be worth the effort.

Living with the surveillance state

Posted Dec 8, 2013 17:43 UTC (Sun) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

Another case of "obviously" correct but actually buggy: http://lwn.net/Articles/575460/