This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you're just referring to different areas of software security, the long-term equilibrium is decidedly in favor of defense. Bugs, especially exploitable bugs, are a consequence of the fact that on any objective scale our programming languages still suck (especially the fact that the ones which suck less on security tend to suck more on performance) and our programmers suck (yeah, including me, sorry), not because it's actually impossible to write a program that does what you want but doesn't also let you get p0wned as soon as someone figures out just the right corrupt input data to send. In the meantime, before we have languages that aren't larded with Undefined Behavior pitfalls and/or the ability to cheaply write programs that never stumble into exploitable pitfalls, initiatives like Project Glasswing are a pretty good way to keep the short-term equilibrium in favor of the defender too.
If you're also thinking about e.g. biological security ... well, yeah, there is a chance we'll all be dead soon. I'd like to hope that, since our immune systems are pretty versatile, maybe natural pathogen evolution is already stress-testing us near the limit of what a bioweapon could do, and in the worst case maybe AI could quickly figure out a vaccine to prepare us in advance of infection by any even-more-dangerous inventions ... but "we can make software good enough" is practically a theorem, whereas "we can make immune systems good enough" is more of a prayer. That prayer would have to be answered, not just for humans directly, but for all the life that humans depend on. Florida's orange production is down over 90% since the first spread of "greening disease" there, and we've had decades of inability to fix it, and if something similarly unstoppable ever infects corn, rice, and/or wheat too then there are going to be a lot of starving people.
This is heavily disputed to put it lightly. The ask here is something like all software everywhere be written/rewritten incredibly defensively and continuously upgraded as the models get better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. Even hardening what we have now, even with mythos helping via glasswing, this is long term project. The trouble is that the defender has to win every fight in every domain for every surface, while the attacker needs to only win once. The effort disequilibrium is massive.
Yes, and I've personally read reports on my software that have gone through this program. Importantly the defends have better tools here.
Yes. Seems pretty bad. I personally do not want to die.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link