Cory Doctorow on Software Security and the Internet of Things
Cory Doctorow has a good essay on software integrity and control problems and the Internet of Things. He’s writing about self-driving cars, but the issue is much more general. Basically, we’re going to want systems that prevent their owner from making certain changes to it. We know how to do this: digital rights management. We also know that this solution doesn’t work, and trying introduces all sorts of security vulnerabilities. So we have a problem.
This is an old problem. (Adam Shostack and I wrote a paper about it in 1999, about smart cards.) The Internet of Things is going to make it much worse. And it’s one we’re not anywhere near prepared to solve.
Winter • December 31, 2015 7:36 AM
As has been written before: Code is Law
http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html
Which means that when you write code, you also have to make the considerations that go into law making. This includes the ethics and false incentives that go with the law.