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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't help but laugh at this:

"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors"

Bugs introduced by the browser vendors? What? What?? Wait just second there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being affected by bugs in browsers?

This reads like a thinly veiled conspiracy theory. Actually, I'll just be blunt: it reads like crazy talk.

These things are not conspiracies against the stability of human society, they are the random results of a stochastic process of creation. If you want to say something valuable about the impact of tech on society, there are a whole bunch of directions you could go, but this ain't one of 'em.

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You really should read this text, or any text, more carefully.

Obviously, bugs in Chrome don't affect the power structure of the world. But that is just a trivial example (perhaps not a very good one), experienced by the author, and one that makes him feel a unhealthy concentration of power.

And with regard to conspiracies, a dangerously unbalanced power structure is rarely the result of conspiracy, and is often, just like bugs, the random result of a stochastic process, only one that invariably leads to concentration of power, unless some energy is expended in order to curtail this "natural" phenomenon.

Actually if they interfere with our ability to get information on our own, without having it fed to us by Facebook and Google Now, then the bugs are political, not just technical.

The browser is our gateway, all our information passes through it.

Thanks for encouraging the OP to read the text, btw.

"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors" Bugs introduced by the browser vendors? What? What?? Wait just second there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being affected by bugs in browsers?

There's no need to take everything literally. It's a fact that, for many people, the web browser has grown to a very important communications tool, and "we" have failed in making it a good basis for secure communication.

Also, it depends on what you call a bug. Why do we still rely on the broken CA system for SSL certificates, for example? Not for technical reasons.

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