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Clean Needles for Hackers
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."
As a personal choice, but demanding other people make the same choice takes away the freedom you're trying to protect. The people committing the crimes are the ones that should have their freedom restricted.
So making people write good code isn't impacting people's civil liberties? Considering most of the developers I know, that'd put most of them out of work...
Hackers are not dying of really horrid diseases and passing these diseases onto non-hackers, are they? Maybe we should give clean needles to the hackers, and then let the war-on-drugs folks deal with them.
Whoa, what a concept! Improve systems security making them more secure!
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"
They are talking about User Mode Linux, not the markup language. With a nick like that, I can see how you could make that mistake.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
The 'clean needle' approach basically involves making life easier for the criminal group (drug addicts) so that they don't need to commit so many troublesome crimes -- thus making life easier for everyone.
The approach advocated in the Register involves making life harder for the criminal group (hackers) so that they aren't able to commit troublesome crimes.
There is no similarity, and furthermore, while the 'clean needle' thing is hightly controversial and frequently shades into a program of government-subsidised drug abuse, writing software more securely is obviously beneficial and should be a no-brainer.
I therefore conclude, your honor, that the phrase 'clean needle' was only introduced because it's eyecatching -- perhaps because the original submitter was caught in a fringe eddy of the Really Rather Silly Field (RRSF) that usually surrounds The Register.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I can see it now . . .
Please . . . I don't want to be a bother, but can you help a brother out? I'm hurting, man . . . I just need five more dollars to buy some safer software . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.