- Joined
- Dec 6, 2015
Tech community: What do you think of the idea of the government slamming its massive bureaucratic cock into your field?
Wow, this is such an ill conceived idea it boggles my mind.
There are thousands of open source projects, and only a tiny fraction of them contain anything remotely security critical. Of those, probably less than 100 or so are what I'd call obligate security critical, by which I mean they definitely need to exist and are unavoidably part of a computer's attack surface.
All of the major projects that are depended on as internet infrastructure are already sponsored either directly or indirectly by private industry. Either directly in that they are developed by a company, or indirectly in that the programmer(s) are employed by companies who allow them to develop the software as part of their job.
There is nothing that giving extra money direct to the developers is going to achieve in terms of additional security. How would you even measure the performance of these grants anyway? Government money could conceivably be usefully spent on sponsoring security researchers to find bugs and produce code analysis tools, and the governments of any number of countries worldwide already spend quite large sums on pure research to find new cryptographic techniques, which generally find their way in to the public domain in the course of time.
Wu just doesn't understand anything about software development. It's amazing how she seems to think of herself as more knowledgeable about technology than the average politician, but every time she opens her mouth on the subject she embarrasses herself by demonstrating her ignorance. I want to see Randi Harper have another catfight with her over this shit. As terrible of a programmer as Randi is, at least she does kind of understand something about how software is produced if only by osmosis from working with actual developers.
