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The kind of people who design things like this tend to think about such issues defensively, from the start.

Much of our fundamental problems with software seciruty stems from the fact that people don't think of software as of something particularily dangerous.

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One would certainly hope this to be the case, but it's hard to watch SG1 and get the impression that the ancients had much of a concept of defensive design.

On the contrary, my view is that the Ancients knew defensive design is a /hard/ problem, for higher level languages. The lower level parts (like the actual Stargates) had smart companion interfaces where the safety features exist. The fact that you can over-ride a safety, presumably if you know what it exists for and have a use case for ignoring it, is a good engineering feature for a device that might be used in more extreme circumstances. (Such as evacuating from an Ori invasion.)

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