The second list was always accessible through the History menu. I did know about it and I didn't think its a bug.
But there was no equivalent to the History menu for downloads. The closest equivalent seems to be Tools->Downloads, which is exactly the screen where things were shown before, which offered a UI to remove them from the list, but which then put removed items back again after the Firefox 20 update.
Oh, stop it. I have five machines, all configured to delete browsing history, download history, and cookies on exit, and not one of them have shown what you three have described.
Of course not; you're not doing the same thing as we are describing.
You're talking about auto-deleting the entire history of a certain type.
But we don't want to do that, because most of the time the history is useful. We're talking about selectively deleting individual items from the history that are sensitive for whatever reason, and then those items coming back again after this update in the exact same screen where they were gone before, as well as obviously not having been deleted properly originally even though they appeared to be removed in any accessible part of the user interface before the update.
There is absolutely no way you can explain the kinds of behaviour that I and others have been reporting throughout this discussion as anything but a set of serious blunders by the Firefox developers regarding both usability and privacy. If there's even a question over whether software dealing with sensitive information is still storing that data after a user believes they've explicitly deleted it via the UI then you automatically have a serious problem.
Making private mode per-window is a major infrastructural change.
You don't see any problem with a browser auto-updating in a backward-incompatible way, with serious potential implications for users' privacy? Or you do, but even though the major reason Firefox is any good as a browser is the extension ecosystem, you think that it's OK to arbitrarily move the goalposts and expect everyone's installed extensions to magically stay up-to-date at the same time? The whole "breaking extensions every update" thing got old a long time ago.
Right now, it doesn't draw markers properly on paths for one thing. You just get a big block instead of, say, the arrowhead you expected. Copy and paste the marker example right out of the W3C SVG spec for an example.
It looks like they've broken Private Browsing as far as extensions are concerned as well.
I use Lazarus to avoid losing form data if things crash, and it used to automatically disable itself in Private Browsing mode. I've just confirmed that since updating to Firefox 20 this doesn't happen any more, even though the relevant Lazarus option is still set the same way.
It would be nice if they fixed all the basic SVG functionality they completely broken in IE10. Perhaps once they can do vector graphics in 2D properly again, we'll let them add the third dimension.:-)
Yes, remarkably it turns out that grown-ups use the Internet for things that need privacy other than the one you're thinking of. In this case, I was looking at every bank account number for my company, since among my recent downloads were records from on-line banking to do our taxes and the files were named after each account. Sorry if that wasn't the giggly story you were hoping for, but when you're old enough to have a bank account and a job of your own, I'm sure you'll understand.
Which is OK until you hit Ctrl+Shift+T or open History->Recently Closed Tabs, which apparently keep these things around even if you've explicitly deleted them from your history.
I just opened a second window for the first time since upgrading to Firefox 20 a few minutes ago, and it even tried to reopen a page I was working on earlier today, which I clearly haven't visited for several hours because it's an admin UI hosted on a device that's powered off right now. I have absolutely no idea why it chose that page to open, and not any of the dozens I must have visited since. In fact, I have no idea why it tried to reopen any old pages at all, though I had restarted Firefox a couple of minutes earlier after updating various extensions so perhaps that was something to do with it.
I routinely delete things like download history when I've no further need for the files, partly as a tidiness thing and partly as a privacy thing. (This is a work machine that I use for my consulting/contracting gigs, including screen sharing for presentations/teleconferencing from time to time, so both tidiness and discretion are often called for.)
Suddenly, when I go to Tools->Downloads, there's a whole list of everything I downloaded since forever, not least a few potentially sensitive financial records and a whole trail of breadcrumbs identifying clients and various commercial research I've been doing on their behalf. The files are long gone, of course, but it's a good thing that lot didn't show up in the middle of a screen-sharing session with a different client.
What's more disturbing is that despite being reasonably careful about these things, or so I thought, Firefox has apparently been keeping a detailed record of these downloads even though I'd been clearing the old Downloads dialog regularly. What else is it storing away somewhere that I don't know about?
private is private and provided you use proper security on access controls all is hunky dory
If your data is stored unencrypted, and your physical security can't guarantee to prevent hostile access to storage devices, then you don't really have any access control at all.
Because health system in the UK is completely free
Sadly, that isn't quite true. Politicians like to use phrases like "free at the point of need", in the sense that if you need to call an ambulance after an accident or visit your GP to discuss some symptoms you won't normally be charged anything. But if my doctor prescribes me some routine medication that I go down and collect from the local pharmacy, I have to pay the standard NHS prescription charge of £7.65 (soon to be £7.85) each time.
(I should acknowledge, however, that many people do get help with NHS charges for various reasons, sometimes covering the full amount.)
No qualified doctor should be prescribing medication just because a patient "demands" it. That would be both a fundamental failure of their duty of care to the patient and an abuse of their authority to legally prescribe controlled substances.
All of this goes double for antibiotics, because there is a real danger of overuse combined with people's tendency not to complete full courses of treatment contributing to the development of resistant strains like MRSA.
Thanks for the extra details. If the objection was not merely to the act of sending a GET but rather to the systematic use of GETs to try to establish unauthorised access by unexpected means, that does shine a very different light on the situation as a whole and the case seems a lot more reasonable.
So what you are saying is that when freedom is being abused, it's the job of government to move to limit it?
Of course. Who else's job is it?
All laws are ultimately based on the premise that some irresponsible actions are harmful and should not be permitted. All laws ultimately limit an individual's freedom to do such things at the expense of everyone else. Are you in favour of not having any laws?
And that failure of the government to enforce specific laws against abuse of certain freedoms is good justification for government to make general laws taking away the freedoms being abused.
I'm not sure how either part of that sentence has anything to do with the current situation. What specific laws do you think existed previously that should have effectively prevented the kinds of problems that were exposed by Leveson? And in what specific way does the proposed scheme generally remove anyone's freedom?
Sure, but the mere fact that about 2/3 of the federal legislature, at two different levels, were in favour of this speaks volumes about how safe (or otherwise) the idea of absolute free speech really is in the US. After all, does it still need a Constitutional amendment if 2/3 of the Supreme Court were to decide otherwise?
Such actions can be prosecuted under laws which have nothing to do with restricting freedom of the press. I find it hard to believe that there aren't such laws in the UK. This whole thing sounds like an excuse to control the press when there are other ways of dealing with such flagrant problems.
That's the point, though, isn't it? The laws in the UK didn't stop flagrant press intrusion, by many well-established organisations, over an extended period of time. This was clearly established during a public, judge-led investigation.
A few of those involved -- but only a few -- have subsequently been prosecuted. However, that won't be a lot of comfort to those who were harmed, and the threat of such punishment to individual fall guys demonstrably wasn't an effective deterrent to the media giants as a whole.
It is therefore necessary to create by law a sufficient deterrent that the organisations as a whole are afraid to do such obviously wrong things. Freedom of the press is important to balance corrupting influences like meddling by the administration of the day in the flow of information that might expose their flaws. However, as always, with freedom comes responsibility. Quite clearly there was a systematic, widespread failure to live up to those responsibilities within the media industry, a flagrant abuse of the freedoms they enjoyed. I, for one, won't shed any tears when those who apparently can't be trusted to act responsibly and with respect for others gets their freedoms curtailed.
Here's a final thought. If you want a but-what-about-corruption argument in the 21st century, you might consider that freedom of the press matters a lot less than it used to, while ensuring the integrity of communications networks matters a lot more than it used to. If you want to ensure that powerful interests remain in check, maybe you should be campaigning for things like net neutrality and telecom companies that act only as common carriers, and lobbying against forcing (or allowing) those infrastructure providers to monitor or modify the contents of your communications or who you can communicate with.
This is what happens when the government asks you to register before exercising rights.
Except that, of course, that isn't even slightly what is being proposed here.
You could still write the same things as ever, with the same freedoms you always had, under the same general legal framework. Under that framework, bloggers can already be sued under defamation laws today, with the risk of a huge payout if they caused serious damage.
The new proposals are akin to a safe harbour scheme as an incentive for press to join the new regulatory framework. As for some of the quoted "bloggers" who don't like this: I have no problem with treating the big, organised blog sites like any other mass media publication. Some of those sites have readership levels, resources and organisational structure at least on par with and possibly much greater than typical local press. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably tasty with plum sauce.
Sadly, part of the cost of the freedoms we'll still have is that nothing prevents the ignorant from posting knee-jerk reactionary trolls on sites like this.
Hey Limeys, what do you think of our First Amendment now?
Honestly? I think it's overly broad, it strengthens one set of important ideas too much at the expense of other important ideas, and I wouldn't want anything so one-sided on our statute books without something similarly strong to protect those other ideas as well.
Remember, these proposals didn't magically appear overnight. They happened after one of the most extensive judge-led investigations in British legal history, which painted a pretty damning picture of the way the press who are about to get regulation slapped on them were behaving when merely "self-regulated". Somehow, I don't think the First Amendment was intended to protect a right for the press to spy on people whose children were the victims of horrible crimes in the hope of getting a sensational front page article or two out of them.
In Europe just the other day, a guy was sentenced to jail for tearing up a Qur'an. Let me know when that happens in the US.
Yeah, it's not like in the US you were one Senate vote away from Congress approving an amendment to the Constitution specifically to penalise flag burning or anything. Oh, wait, you were. And that was not the first attempt to get such a measure through, and it was within the last decade.
They were incompetent and irresponsible with customer data and as far as i'm concerned, handing the data to the press was the absolute right call. How else to punish and teach?
By having real data protection laws and then reporting people who break them to the appropriate authorities so they can be prosecuted/sued accordingly?
...sending GET requests to an unprotected, publicly-accessible web server constitute unauthorized access...
Am I reading this right? Someone was convicted of a criminal offence because he did something that search engines like Google do millions of times every day?
I agree with much of what you say. I just don't see why it's relevant to someone who wants to self-publish electronically and doesn't care about formal publishers and bricks 'n' mortar stores and all the other dinosaurs and parasites in the traditional book industry. The fact that not having an ISBN makes life more difficult for those other organisations is their problem, not the author's or the immediate reader's.
One issue that I do think is going to become increasingly important is keeping historical archives. In times gone by, when it was clear that a book had been published and your national reference library was automatically entitled to claim a physical copy, there was a socially useful function being served. In the Internet era and with the rise of self-publishing, there is no equivalent to that clear publication date and version for a lot of good material. In fact, that material doesn't even need to be a big, formal, paid-for item like an e-book or PDF; it might just be a personal web site full of great content about the author's favourite hobby or personal research interest. There are many issues with how to deal with the "digital dark age" that comes from fast-evolving, transient content that might be available only for a limited time or might be protected by some sort of DRM or trapped in a large walled garden, and I think there is a real risk that just as we are learning to share human knowledge and creative works more effectively than ever before, we might also be locking those things up so that they are lost to future generations (or even current generations in just a few years' time). But I don't think something as simple as trying to assign an ISBN to any self-published e-book is really going to solve the problem of version controlling the Internet with due respect to both authors' interests today and humanity's interests tomorrow.
And books go out of print. An ISBN no more guarantees that you can find a copy of the book once published with that ID than a URL guarantees that the web site where the PDF e-book was sold will still be there. But permalink-type URLs don't change by magic any more than ISBNs do, so I'm not sure I see a huge problem here.
Because ISBN numbers are also a unique identifier; they fulfil bibliographic and cataloguing functions.
But who needs old school bibliographic and cataloguing functions for self-published books when we have URLs for citation, search engines and social networks to find new material, and any number of services that authors can use to collect payment in return for supplying an electronic copy directly?
ISBNs are basically irrelevant to electronic self-publishers in the era of the World Wide Web, because you can supply a PDF or similar document as easily as an HTML page.
So, at what point do we wake up and realize that current models of hardware and software development are fundamentally flawed in terms of having products which by their very nature introduce unacceptable security risks to store any data or information?
That's hardly a secret. It's a cost/benefit question, and there is enough benefit around right now that most people are willing to pay the cost/accept a modest risk rather than going without.
Or, rather, at what point does someone wake up and develop a system that can be trusted out of the box to be secure?
You'll never have perfect security, because many useful things are inherently insecure on some level. But yes, we could certainly do a lot better than we do right now.
I personally suspect that any qualitative shift in the industry first needs the development of an industrial-scale application programming language (and a comprehensive supporting ecosystem in terms of tools and libraries) that manages to combine reasonably high performance and flexible low-level access with much stronger architectural support features than any mainstream language offers today.
We know a lot about how to build such a programming language already, and many useful techniques are already tried and tested in more academic/obscure/innovative languages. Unfortunately, this is a chicken and egg kind of problem: you need to get enough developers using your language that the ecosystem develops enough for mainstream industrial use, but attracting the non-enthusiast developers needs some sort of ecosystem to be there already. And as long as most customers are willing to pay significant money for software that doesn't have lots of bugs/vulnerabilities, accepting these things are somehow inevitable in the way that most non-geeks today probably do, there isn't sufficient commercial incentive for the few organisations that could actually do it to throw megabucks into developing the language and a bootstrappable ecosystem from scratch right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The second list was always accessible through the History menu. I did know about it and I didn't think its a bug.
But there was no equivalent to the History menu for downloads. The closest equivalent seems to be Tools->Downloads, which is exactly the screen where things were shown before, which offered a UI to remove them from the list, but which then put removed items back again after the Firefox 20 update.
Oh, stop it. I have five machines, all configured to delete browsing history, download history, and cookies on exit, and not one of them have shown what you three have described.
Of course not; you're not doing the same thing as we are describing.
You're talking about auto-deleting the entire history of a certain type.
But we don't want to do that, because most of the time the history is useful. We're talking about selectively deleting individual items from the history that are sensitive for whatever reason, and then those items coming back again after this update in the exact same screen where they were gone before, as well as obviously not having been deleted properly originally even though they appeared to be removed in any accessible part of the user interface before the update.
There is absolutely no way you can explain the kinds of behaviour that I and others have been reporting throughout this discussion as anything but a set of serious blunders by the Firefox developers regarding both usability and privacy. If there's even a question over whether software dealing with sensitive information is still storing that data after a user believes they've explicitly deleted it via the UI then you automatically have a serious problem.
Making private mode per-window is a major infrastructural change.
You don't see any problem with a browser auto-updating in a backward-incompatible way, with serious potential implications for users' privacy? Or you do, but even though the major reason Firefox is any good as a browser is the extension ecosystem, you think that it's OK to arbitrarily move the goalposts and expect everyone's installed extensions to magically stay up-to-date at the same time? The whole "breaking extensions every update" thing got old a long time ago.
Right now, it doesn't draw markers properly on paths for one thing. You just get a big block instead of, say, the arrowhead you expected. Copy and paste the marker example right out of the W3C SVG spec for an example.
It looks like they've broken Private Browsing as far as extensions are concerned as well.
I use Lazarus to avoid losing form data if things crash, and it used to automatically disable itself in Private Browsing mode. I've just confirmed that since updating to Firefox 20 this doesn't happen any more, even though the relevant Lazarus option is still set the same way.
It would be nice if they fixed all the basic SVG functionality they completely broken in IE10. Perhaps once they can do vector graphics in 2D properly again, we'll let them add the third dimension. :-)
Yes, remarkably it turns out that grown-ups use the Internet for things that need privacy other than the one you're thinking of. In this case, I was looking at every bank account number for my company, since among my recent downloads were records from on-line banking to do our taxes and the files were named after each account. Sorry if that wasn't the giggly story you were hoping for, but when you're old enough to have a bank account and a job of your own, I'm sure you'll understand.
Which is OK until you hit Ctrl+Shift+T or open History->Recently Closed Tabs, which apparently keep these things around even if you've explicitly deleted them from your history.
I just opened a second window for the first time since upgrading to Firefox 20 a few minutes ago, and it even tried to reopen a page I was working on earlier today, which I clearly haven't visited for several hours because it's an admin UI hosted on a device that's powered off right now. I have absolutely no idea why it chose that page to open, and not any of the dozens I must have visited since. In fact, I have no idea why it tried to reopen any old pages at all, though I had restarted Firefox a couple of minutes earlier after updating various extensions so perhaps that was something to do with it.
Well, that's freaky.
I routinely delete things like download history when I've no further need for the files, partly as a tidiness thing and partly as a privacy thing. (This is a work machine that I use for my consulting/contracting gigs, including screen sharing for presentations/teleconferencing from time to time, so both tidiness and discretion are often called for.)
Suddenly, when I go to Tools->Downloads, there's a whole list of everything I downloaded since forever, not least a few potentially sensitive financial records and a whole trail of breadcrumbs identifying clients and various commercial research I've been doing on their behalf. The files are long gone, of course, but it's a good thing that lot didn't show up in the middle of a screen-sharing session with a different client.
What's more disturbing is that despite being reasonably careful about these things, or so I thought, Firefox has apparently been keeping a detailed record of these downloads even though I'd been clearing the old Downloads dialog regularly. What else is it storing away somewhere that I don't know about?
private is private and provided you use proper security on access controls all is hunky dory
If your data is stored unencrypted, and your physical security can't guarantee to prevent hostile access to storage devices, then you don't really have any access control at all.
Because health system in the UK is completely free
Sadly, that isn't quite true. Politicians like to use phrases like "free at the point of need", in the sense that if you need to call an ambulance after an accident or visit your GP to discuss some symptoms you won't normally be charged anything. But if my doctor prescribes me some routine medication that I go down and collect from the local pharmacy, I have to pay the standard NHS prescription charge of £7.65 (soon to be £7.85) each time.
(I should acknowledge, however, that many people do get help with NHS charges for various reasons, sometimes covering the full amount.)
No qualified doctor should be prescribing medication just because a patient "demands" it. That would be both a fundamental failure of their duty of care to the patient and an abuse of their authority to legally prescribe controlled substances.
All of this goes double for antibiotics, because there is a real danger of overuse combined with people's tendency not to complete full courses of treatment contributing to the development of resistant strains like MRSA.
Thanks for the extra details. If the objection was not merely to the act of sending a GET but rather to the systematic use of GETs to try to establish unauthorised access by unexpected means, that does shine a very different light on the situation as a whole and the case seems a lot more reasonable.
So what you are saying is that when freedom is being abused, it's the job of government to move to limit it?
Of course. Who else's job is it?
All laws are ultimately based on the premise that some irresponsible actions are harmful and should not be permitted. All laws ultimately limit an individual's freedom to do such things at the expense of everyone else. Are you in favour of not having any laws?
And that failure of the government to enforce specific laws against abuse of certain freedoms is good justification for government to make general laws taking away the freedoms being abused.
I'm not sure how either part of that sentence has anything to do with the current situation. What specific laws do you think existed previously that should have effectively prevented the kinds of problems that were exposed by Leveson? And in what specific way does the proposed scheme generally remove anyone's freedom?
Sure, but the mere fact that about 2/3 of the federal legislature, at two different levels, were in favour of this speaks volumes about how safe (or otherwise) the idea of absolute free speech really is in the US. After all, does it still need a Constitutional amendment if 2/3 of the Supreme Court were to decide otherwise?
Such actions can be prosecuted under laws which have nothing to do with restricting freedom of the press. I find it hard to believe that there aren't such laws in the UK. This whole thing sounds like an excuse to control the press when there are other ways of dealing with such flagrant problems.
That's the point, though, isn't it? The laws in the UK didn't stop flagrant press intrusion, by many well-established organisations, over an extended period of time. This was clearly established during a public, judge-led investigation.
A few of those involved -- but only a few -- have subsequently been prosecuted. However, that won't be a lot of comfort to those who were harmed, and the threat of such punishment to individual fall guys demonstrably wasn't an effective deterrent to the media giants as a whole.
It is therefore necessary to create by law a sufficient deterrent that the organisations as a whole are afraid to do such obviously wrong things. Freedom of the press is important to balance corrupting influences like meddling by the administration of the day in the flow of information that might expose their flaws. However, as always, with freedom comes responsibility. Quite clearly there was a systematic, widespread failure to live up to those responsibilities within the media industry, a flagrant abuse of the freedoms they enjoyed. I, for one, won't shed any tears when those who apparently can't be trusted to act responsibly and with respect for others gets their freedoms curtailed.
Here's a final thought. If you want a but-what-about-corruption argument in the 21st century, you might consider that freedom of the press matters a lot less than it used to, while ensuring the integrity of communications networks matters a lot more than it used to. If you want to ensure that powerful interests remain in check, maybe you should be campaigning for things like net neutrality and telecom companies that act only as common carriers, and lobbying against forcing (or allowing) those infrastructure providers to monitor or modify the contents of your communications or who you can communicate with.
This is what happens when the government asks you to register before exercising rights.
Except that, of course, that isn't even slightly what is being proposed here.
You could still write the same things as ever, with the same freedoms you always had, under the same general legal framework. Under that framework, bloggers can already be sued under defamation laws today, with the risk of a huge payout if they caused serious damage.
The new proposals are akin to a safe harbour scheme as an incentive for press to join the new regulatory framework. As for some of the quoted "bloggers" who don't like this: I have no problem with treating the big, organised blog sites like any other mass media publication. Some of those sites have readership levels, resources and organisational structure at least on par with and possibly much greater than typical local press. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably tasty with plum sauce.
Sadly, part of the cost of the freedoms we'll still have is that nothing prevents the ignorant from posting knee-jerk reactionary trolls on sites like this.
Hey Limeys, what do you think of our First Amendment now?
Honestly? I think it's overly broad, it strengthens one set of important ideas too much at the expense of other important ideas, and I wouldn't want anything so one-sided on our statute books without something similarly strong to protect those other ideas as well.
Remember, these proposals didn't magically appear overnight. They happened after one of the most extensive judge-led investigations in British legal history, which painted a pretty damning picture of the way the press who are about to get regulation slapped on them were behaving when merely "self-regulated". Somehow, I don't think the First Amendment was intended to protect a right for the press to spy on people whose children were the victims of horrible crimes in the hope of getting a sensational front page article or two out of them.
In Europe just the other day, a guy was sentenced to jail for tearing up a Qur'an. Let me know when that happens in the US.
Yeah, it's not like in the US you were one Senate vote away from Congress approving an amendment to the Constitution specifically to penalise flag burning or anything. Oh, wait, you were. And that was not the first attempt to get such a measure through, and it was within the last decade.
They were incompetent and irresponsible with customer data and as far as i'm concerned, handing the data to the press was the absolute right call. How else to punish and teach?
By having real data protection laws and then reporting people who break them to the appropriate authorities so they can be prosecuted/sued accordingly?
...sending GET requests to an unprotected, publicly-accessible web server constitute unauthorized access...
Am I reading this right? Someone was convicted of a criminal offence because he did something that search engines like Google do millions of times every day?
I agree with much of what you say. I just don't see why it's relevant to someone who wants to self-publish electronically and doesn't care about formal publishers and bricks 'n' mortar stores and all the other dinosaurs and parasites in the traditional book industry. The fact that not having an ISBN makes life more difficult for those other organisations is their problem, not the author's or the immediate reader's.
One issue that I do think is going to become increasingly important is keeping historical archives. In times gone by, when it was clear that a book had been published and your national reference library was automatically entitled to claim a physical copy, there was a socially useful function being served. In the Internet era and with the rise of self-publishing, there is no equivalent to that clear publication date and version for a lot of good material. In fact, that material doesn't even need to be a big, formal, paid-for item like an e-book or PDF; it might just be a personal web site full of great content about the author's favourite hobby or personal research interest. There are many issues with how to deal with the "digital dark age" that comes from fast-evolving, transient content that might be available only for a limited time or might be protected by some sort of DRM or trapped in a large walled garden, and I think there is a real risk that just as we are learning to share human knowledge and creative works more effectively than ever before, we might also be locking those things up so that they are lost to future generations (or even current generations in just a few years' time). But I don't think something as simple as trying to assign an ISBN to any self-published e-book is really going to solve the problem of version controlling the Internet with due respect to both authors' interests today and humanity's interests tomorrow.
And books go out of print. An ISBN no more guarantees that you can find a copy of the book once published with that ID than a URL guarantees that the web site where the PDF e-book was sold will still be there. But permalink-type URLs don't change by magic any more than ISBNs do, so I'm not sure I see a huge problem here.
Because ISBN numbers are also a unique identifier; they fulfil bibliographic and cataloguing functions.
But who needs old school bibliographic and cataloguing functions for self-published books when we have URLs for citation, search engines and social networks to find new material, and any number of services that authors can use to collect payment in return for supplying an electronic copy directly?
ISBNs are basically irrelevant to electronic self-publishers in the era of the World Wide Web, because you can supply a PDF or similar document as easily as an HTML page.
So, at what point do we wake up and realize that current models of hardware and software development are fundamentally flawed in terms of having products which by their very nature introduce unacceptable security risks to store any data or information?
That's hardly a secret. It's a cost/benefit question, and there is enough benefit around right now that most people are willing to pay the cost/accept a modest risk rather than going without.
Or, rather, at what point does someone wake up and develop a system that can be trusted out of the box to be secure?
You'll never have perfect security, because many useful things are inherently insecure on some level. But yes, we could certainly do a lot better than we do right now.
I personally suspect that any qualitative shift in the industry first needs the development of an industrial-scale application programming language (and a comprehensive supporting ecosystem in terms of tools and libraries) that manages to combine reasonably high performance and flexible low-level access with much stronger architectural support features than any mainstream language offers today.
We know a lot about how to build such a programming language already, and many useful techniques are already tried and tested in more academic/obscure/innovative languages. Unfortunately, this is a chicken and egg kind of problem: you need to get enough developers using your language that the ecosystem develops enough for mainstream industrial use, but attracting the non-enthusiast developers needs some sort of ecosystem to be there already. And as long as most customers are willing to pay significant money for software that doesn't have lots of bugs/vulnerabilities, accepting these things are somehow inevitable in the way that most non-geeks today probably do, there isn't sufficient commercial incentive for the few organisations that could actually do it to throw megabucks into developing the language and a bootstrappable ecosystem from scratch right now.