2004-01-19 16:35
by Vasil KolevThere are some thoughts to share, and I’m off to the test…
I was reading an article, referred from slashdot The Future of Security. After reading it, I started wondering, how can there be so misguided people that coudn’t understand the simple facts, like the core principle of internet, to ‘route around problems’, that regulations and prohibition haven’t helped until now, and there is really slim possibility for them to help in the future… I don’t know about all of you, but I have seen my share of apocalyptic predictions and equivalents, and deny trusting them until they provide some logical and clear explanation, with enough facts to back it up (not like in the article, ‘there are a lot of problems, there will be more of them, we will be screwed’, without even telling what the problems are, and not taking into consideration the small problem that such problems tend to cancel each other, not to amplify).
Something really annoying is that the author, like a lot of other people, doesn’t want to accept, that there isn’t a better solution than educating people about the instruments they’re using. I don’t know where can you find a driver that can’t shift into second gear, or a pilot, who doesn’t know it’s plane really good, up to the physics that keep him in the air. But there are a lot of people that have no idea how to use their machine correctly, and just create problems. Dammit, those people probably know more about operating their washing machine…
Nobody wants to make a real long-term solution, everyone ‘invents’ and applies band-aid solutions, and the result starts to look like IIS 5 – and IMO the people, who offer such solutions, don’t have a good idea about the problem, and in most cases are a part of it – they find thinking hard, without any pleasant results, and why shoudn’t we write something meaningless, that’s just made up and will pass through the editor, and get our money – exactly the principle, that newspapers are made to be bought, not read.
By the way, a lot of people think that the education of the end user is a lost cause. I’d like to remind them, really hard != impossible, and with the proper resources everything can be accomplished, like with a elementary CS program for the grade school. And probably in 20-30 years the idea about the BOFH and the lusers will just sound like something old and not really true…
:) Looks like everyone forgets, that you can’t fix social problems with technical measures, and you can’t fix them with bad laws either? History has a lot of such examples.
I almost forgot, I moved my mail filter to the server, and I won’t depend on Evolution to do the filtering (which sucks sometimes). I’ll install something command line on marla, to be able to read the mail through the command line, when I’m not around something that has a good imap-ssl client.