Clean Needles for Hackers

Posted by michael on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @02:30AM from the prophylactic dept.

scubacuda writes "Jon Lasser of the Register opines that we should "give up on the notion that computer security can be improved by putting more people in prison." He argues that a "harm reduction" approach (similar to that of "clean needle" campaign in the War on Drugs) might be more productive. If we, say, wrote in safer programming languages, used tools like Immunix's StackGuard, ProPolice, or OpenBSD 3.3, chroot and UML, we could reduce the damage a malicious hacker might do without damaging our civil liberities."

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Re:What??? by Diamondback · 2003-04-23 03:28 · Score: 0, Flamebait

the focus should actually be on removing reasons for people to commit crimes, not just 'preventing' them. you can prevent crimes by making the actual doing of them nearly impossible... end result? 1984.

but if you remove the reasons for people do want to commit crimes, then you only have to deal with the really hardcore/hardwired criminal types instead of troubled youth stealing cuz it makes them fit in, etc.