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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

If anything that is an education problem, which is further compounded by the trend of wanting to turn users into completely passive entities who don't know or have to do anything, because then they are more easily controlled and manipulated.

The industry does not encourage users to think and learn. The industry wants its software to do the thinking for them. It doesn't want users to think about trust at all. I think that is the scariest part of where things are heading.

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Users in the past had every opportunity to think and learn, and their failure to do so is why we are where we are today. I mean, there are still people who refuse to wear seatbelts or vaccinate their children... How can we ever expect people to understand all the moving parts in a secure computer system?

That's the great fallacy though. The amount of technical knowledge required to make truly informed security decisions is out of the question for 99% of all computer/mobile users.

It isn't about being passive; it's about having lives and jobs and other things to do with their time. A heart surgeon may be a genius but he doesn't have time to keep up with the latest research and teach himself PKI, certificates, crypto, and permission models across all the platforms he uses (and keep up to date on those too!)

Users will not waste their time thinkin about trust. The history of our industry is ample evidence that it would be a losing battle. Not to mention a single mistake can be ruinous, requiring absolute perfection 100% of the time (from users and programmers).

Not to mention a single mistake can be ruinous, requiring absolute perfection 100% of the time (from users and programmers).

One can hope that, eventually, formally mathematically verified open source systems will help solve the issue, at least on the programming side.

I doubt the halting problem will be solved.

The solution to the halting problem is to stop building universal/Turing-complete machines.

Edit: since this was downvoted, I will elaborate. The halting problem only applies to arbitrary programs on Turing-complete systems. It is possible to create useful systems that are not Turing complete. As a baseline example, it is easy to tell that the following Ruby program halts:

    exit

Problems arise when one allows unbounded loops and unbounded recursion. If all loops and all recursions are provably finite, then a program can be proven to exit. All sorts of useful things can be done with systems composed of small, provably terminating programs. And it turns out, the vast majority (if not all) of the things relevant to securing a computer system can be implemented in formally provable ways.

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