SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:
Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization's grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as "teachable moments" for others. "If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training," they say, "the Internet would be a much safer place."
Enough of that. The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can't users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can't they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can't they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?
Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.
[...] We must stop trying to fix the user to achieve security. We'll never get there, and research toward those goals just obscures the real problems. Usable security does not mean "getting people to do what we want." It means creating security that works, given (or despite) what people do. It means security solutions that deliver on users' security goals without -- as the 19th-century Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs aptly put it -- "stress of mind, or knowledge of a long series of rules."
[...] "Blame the victim" thinking is older than the Internet, of course. But that doesn't make it right. We owe it to our users to make the Information Age a safe place for everyone -- not just those with "security awareness."
(Score: 1) by andersjm on Monday October 03 2016, @09:23PM
pine is written in C. Don't count your chickens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @09:33PM
Somebody should rewrite pine in Ada. Adapine will be perfectly secure because nobody will ever use it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @11:31PM
pine, mutt, outlook, and every other major email client have each had open-email-and-get-pwned bugs. More in outlook (see: hooking system explorer renderer in old versions?!) but not zero in any.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:03AM
I don't know about pine and mutt, but the problem with outlook was that it was not a bug. It was a misdesigned feature.
Yes, bugs creep in, and some bugs may be so bad that they may be used to pwn your computer. But they are not there by purpose. A misfeature is there by purpose, and a misfeature that is designed in a way that you have to think less than a minute about to see how it could be used for malicious purposes absolutely should not get into a product. Ever.
Bugs cannot be completely avoided. Blatant misfeatures can.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.