Increased Software Vulnerability, Gov't Regulation

PogieMT writes "An article in the New York Times (registration required) suggests that the rash of security flaws, viruses and worms is leading a push towards greater regulation by the government, which, according to the piece, has largely relied on the efforts of individual companies."

Comments

Re:Regulation is the goal

[Eric Ass Raymond]

I'll choose a democratically elected government over a plutocratic regime of corporations (=markets) any day.

Them wanting to control the IT market

Not all government control over the markets is bad. It's a fact that a capitalist society cannot self-regulate - it's natural growth is always towards a monopoly. This unhealthy growth cannot be curbed by some internal mechanism inherent in he markets (as libertarians like to believe) and external control is always required at some stage.

An incredibly BAD idea

[The Monster]

A little regulation would be nice

It is no more possible to have 'a little regulation' than to be 'a little pregnant'. Throughout the history of industrialized society, the same pattern has been repeated over and over with a new technology:

1. None of the existing agencies seems to have jurisdiction over the peculiar characteristics of the technology, so a thousand flowers bloom. Some work; others don't. The pioneers know this. They expect it.
2. The technology becomes sufficiently stable and productive, relative to existing alternatives, as to become important to the smooth flow of commerce. The 'civilized' people move into the former frontier territory, and expect services to be delivered on demand. They don't know nor care about the work done by the pioneers to get it to work as well as it does.
3. At a certain point, when the political climate is right, the Do-Gooders move in. They declare that the industry is rife with problems that only the government can solve. They seize upon some event (such as a multi-state/province blackout that can be plausibly traced to a computer worm) and demand a law to empower a new bureaucracy to oversee this wild, untamed industry.
4. Sooner or later, the law passes, and the Do-Gooders move on to the next Great Crusade. Meanwhile, the President has to appoint people to run the agency that regulates the industry.

   Now, who knows anything about the industry.... YES! That's right. The people who

   work in that industry (for companies that donated to my campaign).

5. The agency is now part of a revolving door system, where people put in a stint working for one of the major companies in the industry, then go to work for the agency that regulates them, then possibly back to private industry...

Regulating the software business per se would lead to a Federal Software Commission dominated by ex-MS employees, who would write regulations favorable to their former employer -- not even out of corruption but because they express the corporate culture inculcated into them. Mark my words: The day is coming when it will be as illegal to write computer software without a license from the government as it is to practice medicine, law, plumbing or cosmetology without one. Have you noticed that the more laws there are to regulate an industry, the more expensive it is to be a customer thereof? And if you think closed-source is bad, just you wait until the entire profession is reserved for those who take their apprenticeships with other members of the Guild.

Far better to fight laws like UCITA, DMCA, software patents, etc. that attempt to deprive software customers of the few rights they already have, than to try to push for empowering the government to screw customers even more.

Obviously, the free market isn't going to regulate itself when the consumer and even the government has decided that this is normal and that they will just 'put up with it'.

The free market has been forbidden to regulate itself. The customer has been forced to accept shrink-wrap licenses that deprive them, potential competitors, and independent consumer advocates, of the rights that would allow the free market to function correctly (by reverse-engineering to provide competing products, and benchmarking to judge performance and reliability). These licenses are already in violation of the fundamental principles of contract law.

We need to use the laws already on the books - how about a class action suit against a software company that puts out a shrink-wrap license that is fraudulent in the 48 states that haven't yet adopted UCITA (because it tells the customer that they must either accept its terms or return the software unopened for a refund, when no such license terms asserted after the sale can possibly be valid)? That would force the