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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

It's pragmatism. If something doesn't work, it doesn't matter how secure it is.

If something isn't secure, it doesn't work. At that point, you would've been better off shipping a wireframe.

A door with a broken lock still provides value. An online PDF converter on a website without SSL still provides value. I'm not saying security doesn't matter or that it shouldn't be a priority, but things don't need to be perfect to be useful. It makes sense to focus more on functionality than security in many areas. I host a bunch of web apps behind a firewall that aren't secure enough to expose to the public Internet. Even commercial ones.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the problem. If it didn't provide value, no one would use it and its lack of security would be a moot point.

The PDF converter is a great example. It's functional, people use it - to transfer potentially highly sensitive documents over an insecure connection. At that point, it provides value in the same way that a Nigerian prince provides banking services.

For you, no risk seems acceptable when it comes to security. That is generally not the case for most people, who will accept some level of risk (ie an insecure program) if it provides value to them. That's the whole point of risk management.

Pardon me for being pithy. We've all heard the adage about perfect security being a logical impossibility. I will say instead that if a tool doesn't have security proportionate to its risk factor integrated in its design, it doesn't work.

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