This week at LWN: Interview: Vernor Vinge

Read this one! Thats an order! NOW.

This is my # ONE top of the list of most important of anything that happened in 2008.

I did. And then I clicked the Singularity link in the article and lost myself on Wikipedia. Interesting stuff!

Vernor Vinge said:

Quoting: One thing the last ten years have proved is that we seem to be very bad at thinking how stuff can be abused

This is on Slashdot today:

Quoting: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/21/1751210

High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.

TC: Those kids are going to be Linux Geeks. Great hack.

Quoting:One thing the last ten years have proved is that we seem to be very bad at thinking how stuff can be abused

That's the most important observation in that interview. As also Bruce Schneier points out, too few people have what he calls "security mindset":

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_m...

I, as a programmer, think about failure modes of my code *all the time*. I say it's the only way.

I note that both speed cameras and license plates are government programs.

Woops, there I go again, identifying the actual source of the problem and thereby going off topic.

+1 for Bob, good catch ... on all 3 counts.