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Comment by mrfish | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else in Vancouver suddenly worried that our infrastructure will be messed with now? Hey World, you know those Olympics in Feb, well here are some electrical conduits you can fuck up for the event! WTF?

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I for one fear the repercussions of providing the terrorists latitude/longitude of all of our city's drinking fountains. If we can't trust them, we'll have to resort to drinking pre-bottled water!

All of the information being provided is available upon request anyway. I doubt there are any terrorists that are REALLY committed to causing problems, but not committed ENOUGH to go to city hall and request the information - or for that matter, use a free call-before-you-dig service.

One could make a similar argument that open source operating systems are inherently less secure as malicious hackers would know all the weaknesses.

I think it's a matter of perspective. Obviously a product that has a large open source volunteer base will be more secure because of their ability to mobilize against security threats. So the City of Vancouver is Open, but not Open Source because they are not allowing masses amount of people access to change things. I guess you could say that if we could real time vote to change city decisions, then it would be open source.

Most open source projects have a leader who decides what additions and changes to commit. I don't see the City of Vancouver being any different - as long as citizens have the ability to push changes that the city can then decide to commit.

After they fail to do so, maybe this idea can be sold to more municipalities. 'See, Vancouver's still standing, plus they saved $$$ by letting their citizens point out improvements instead of paying high-priced management consultants.'

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