Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You can put up whatever barrier to entry you like. Invent a certificate for Haskell programmers with Ph.Ds. Require everyone who works on your website to have your certificate. Have fun.

But most of the world will tell you where to stick that certification and will cheerfully walk around your "barrier to entry". Then they will hack together a web page using whatever programmers and tools they can find, certified or not, because web pages are very important in the twenty-first century and even the lousiest, slowest, buggiest PHP site is often more valuable than a paper sign stuck on the wall, an entry in the Yellow Pages that nobody reads anymore, a bunch of people sending individual text messages to friends-of-friends, or a static web page from 1997 with a little animated GIF on it.



I wonder if that's only true because we as a society don't (yet) hold people accountable for the code they write, in the way we hold them accountable for the bridges they build or the cars they manufacture?

I wonder what the costs of, say, the Gawker password database breach were? Or perhaps the Sony DRM rootkit on CDs? (Or Apples unpatched Java bug?)

What if the people who wrote and/or deployed the code knew (before they shipped/installed it) that they were going to be held responsible for the costs of any future failures? My guess is we'd then have training and certification and insurance, and professional organisations rising up to certify people as being skilled enough to qualify for insurance for themselves and/or their companies. Much like "Engineers" (who's titles the software industry loves to assume) or "Pilots".

I can torture the "Pilots" analogy further - much like you can do very little training to get a car license, perhaps you'd be allowed to write software that affects only a few people at once, your family and friends, perhaps a colleague or two, even occasionally a stranger, but never more than 6 or 7 other people at once. If you want to store data for more than 6 or 7 people, you need a different class of license - a mini bus license for a dozen or two, then a full bus license, then a train or passenger jet license...

Who _should_ be held responsible for a website's password database getting compromised? At what stage in the progression from "shared GoDaddy hosted out-of-date-wordpress blog about my cat" to "Gawker network with a million or so login credentials inadequately secured" do we draw the line and say "Here is the line in the sand across which more care needs to be taken, and lines of responsibility drawn up and accepted"?

'Cause _surely_ there _should_ be that line somewhere, right?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: