Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • July 14, 2023 8:32 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, name.withheld…, ALL,

Re : With the key to the Kingdom…

“Storm-0558 It may be Silicon Turtles”

The joys of highly hierarchical power structures when “a root of trust” walks out the door. From that point down if it’s in your pocket, you are the one eyed man in the Kingdom of the blind.

The real question about the alledged attackers, is,

“If they knew the attack would be short lived, what did they do with the time they had?”

Microsoft appears to be either unknowing, or keeping it very quiet for some reason not yet known.

I suspect it could be both, as they keep looking to prevent it being a “Foot hold situation”… Microsoft likewise don’t want others who could have been effected taking flight or pushing for pecuniary award.

As you know I’ve maintained my “cloud is a bad idea for most reasons” stance for many years now… likewise my view on crypto-signing not just of code etc but trust in both the specific and general. This event just shows my reasoning valid on both views yet again for the umpteenth time…

Only this time is it the forth or eighth circle those who pushed have entered? Having passed unheaded the warning,

“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”

For those so blighted this is not a “Devine Comedy”, but a “hellish inferno”, that could seem eternal.

Clive Robinson • July 15, 2023 9:17 PM

@ vas pup, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re : It’s not as Lush as it once was, and ICTsec will be worse.

I’ve kind of been dropping the hint that the “Social Media” bubble was on it’s way down. Meta loosing 3/4 of it’s share value, Twitter was on a near straight line descent from well before Hellon Rusk “did a Dixie” on it. Likewise others. As it became clear that what advertisers were being told about “eyes on ads” was at best baloney (Google especially).

So to read the Lush representative saying,

“When we joined social media, Facebook and those
platforms were everything we were looking for…”

Even though rationaly expected… Seeing the past tense “were” was still “an ouch moment”… Like hearing the tinkle on concrete of the pin from a hand-grenade you kind have a foreboading of what’s going to happen next…

We know the US Recession is in all probability going to get a lot worse. As “On-Line” advertising has been shown to be quite a con, and the marketing side less and less effective, I would expect a further withdrawal of scarce resources from what is increasingly looking like a “Lame Duck”.

Throw in Web3, NFT’s, and similar faux-investments that have deflated like a “whoopee cushion” under the rump of the elephant in the room… And in all likelihood AI LLM’s not hanging in long enough for Venture Capitalists to skin/con corporate investors profitably…

But also all the “re-structures” with tens of thousands of ICTsector lay-offs, (250,000 and rising). There is a chance the ICTsector may become a downward preasure on the whole US Economy…

Which is where ICTsec is going to become a nightmare as foreign government sponsored APT and Faux-News is going to see way less opposition, thus we will probably see an up-tic in their activities…

Clive Robinson • July 16, 2023 9:25 PM

@ ALL,

Re : @vas pup – AI regulation & Paywall.

I browse with javascript and cookies “off” and appart from an anoying message the page appears to load up well enough to read.

Clive Robinson • July 17, 2023 5:54 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Winter,

Re : Artificial reef making.

Like @Winter I’m suspicious, the shimmer on the water looks wrong, and I would expect damaged pieces to still be sticking up.

If you look at the ships wake it just disapears at what looks like an image manipulation terminator line. Where the shimmer starts to look wrong.

Now the fun bit,

“If the image has been manipulated, was it by the touch of man or AI?”

So,

Answers on a postcard to “Walk on water Competition” C/O Waggoner Gon HQ, Myronivska Street, Popasna, Donblast.

Clive Robinson • July 17, 2023 7:50 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Whilst doing the research for “The high density Secure Storage with DNA above” I also came across this which might be of interest,

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html

Clive Robinson • July 17, 2023 10:29 PM

@ vas pup,

A couple of things, check the age of the FOX network owner… Also the average age of it’s audiance where “racing grannies” is not a game.

Secondly anti-aging is tied up with ICTsec in a number of ways…

Lets just say it’s very popular with Silicon Valley Corp Execs some of whom are reputed to have tried being vampires… Paying late teenagers for their blood to transfuse (for those thinking of trying it apparently it has no effect of note in winding back the body clock).

What apparently does work the most is proper sleep and eating timing as it significantly reduces inflamation in your dietary system. Also eating a lot of certain vegtables… Though eating two pounds of vegtables –where many of those chemicals are found naturally– every morning might just be way to much for most people…

There is one guy that’s spending around 2million USD/year on having every aspect of his diet and excercise controled. Most of the spend is on medical tests etc which he makes available,

https://fortune.com/2023/07/14/bryan-johnson-spending-2-million-young-forever/

Clive Robinson • July 19, 2023 1:57 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, lurker, Winter, ALL,

“Kerch bridge pic was photoshopped.”

Are you sure it’s “Photoshopped”?

The fact it was faked was obvious by all the little alarm bells it set off.

But I was hoping it had been done by AI and would be an example of what we can expect in the near future as AI algorothms improve.

Clive Robinson • July 19, 2023 3:17 AM

@ Winter,

Not sure what the “trends.google.com” links are supposed to show, the both instantly crap-out with a “429” “to many requests” error.

@ Winter, lurker,

As for,

Whitney Phillips’ book, ” This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”

Yup it reflects a certain mentality of people that “tear the heads of flowers in the park”, “legs off of spiders” etc.

At the final analysis they are of the very selfish form,

“My entitlement, above others rights”.

Or,

“My personal whims, over my responsabilities to society”

In short they have no ability to understand why they are seen as bad. There are words for this inability but if you use them then comments disappear…

Clive Robinson • July 19, 2023 8:21 AM

@ Winter, modem phonems,

Re : Big squeezes abound, and entropy is changing where ever you look.

“Stars are made of the dust of older stars made out of dust from older stars all the way down to the dawn of creation.”

Well Fred Hoyle did not like that idea very much and proved some of his idea. But that “creation” bit is still contentious and nobody has actually proved it (in fact we now appear even further away than we were).

Technically whilst stars can be formed from other stars it’s problematic.

When the earliest stars were formed the available “dust” was very simple matter and contained –as far as we can guess– only a tiny fraction of the elements that you find on the periodic table. Each time a star goes nova, and throws it’s dust out, it is much less simple and contains a bigger chunck of heavier elements, because it’s squashed some of the simpler ones together.

The idea Fred had and demonstrated to the point of general acceptence was this “squeeze them up” of the elements had a logical consistancy.

However most of the elements formed from random behaviour you would expect, could not be stable. Thus would decay down over predictable times to stable elements.

But apparently the maths goes wrong for the “Big Bang” –as Fred sarcastically named it– theory.

Since then people have been trying to save “Big Bang” in numerous ways, none of which simply and logically alow for a big bang at the time and place etc…

Evolution has a hidden side that few talk about, but should more. Whilst it alows for the creation of great complexity, it requires in prefrence for it to be inversely related to time. That is evolution demands only simple or logically simple steps in prefrence to all others on a quite significant probability curve.

So the odds of a complex step are both low in,

1, probability of happening.
2, probability of surviving.

So “so one small step each time, one giant leap each stellar generation”. All random but nailed on the “half life curve”.

But that’s not what we think we see on many evolutionary paths (hence “anti-monkey typist” arguments)…

Anyway right or wrong it keeps people gainfully employed.

But the big “Don’t go there Betty” question is of course,

“What came first?”

That is steping on diety ground, where faith transends all proof yardy yardy and it all happened the tuseday beyond last in cosmological time (Hence Dawkins arguments).

Evolution just says “Work with me baby!” but the implicit assumption is it has an “abundance to work on” from somewhere, that simply is…

All of our theories including evolution work on the “ought f’ nought”[1] principle or that our Universe is closed and bounded[2] that is that in principle it starts at a point of everything and ends at an infinity of average, and it’s a one way trip we call entropy.

The problem, our observations don’t fit the neat model so we keep inventing “road bumps” (constants) along the way to account for what our latest observations reveal dimly.

So instead of the flared trumpet cone you would expect we have, what looks like a knocked over drinking tumbler with a nasty mess dried in at the bottom some call the “impossible early galaxy problem”,

https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/060915/

And what do they call the particularly nasty bit of that mess? Yup the old historical stand by of “The dark ages”…

Which might as well be called “Dragon-land” from the old sea chart notion of “Here be dragons” in reality meaning “Don’t go there Betty”…

The reality is “Dark” means “unknown” so we have three unknowns most will have heard of,

1, Dark ages
2, Dark Energy
3, Dark Matter

All acting as nebulous concepts to cover up the increasingly,

“What we don’t know, that arises in conflict to what we said we knew” and road bumps abound.

With the latest “cough cough” being the argument the journal Monthly Notices of the “Royal Astronomical Society”(RAS) published that say’s “Hey guys, you know we said nearly 14 billion well… We might have to say nearly 27 billion”,

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.amp

But wait, what about,

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-theoretical-mystery-early-massive-galaxies.html

The James Webb and it’s new observations is causing a lot of chalk-board squeaking…

Did I see someone trying to slip another “constant” in on the QT?

Just pass me the pop-corn whist we try and guess who’ll get a Nobel…

[1] One of the more fun British expressions, it means so many things and has a different meaning in one place to another… Most commonly it means “You don’t get something for nothing” but also as commonly with say a pie, “you get what you get”[2] That is a 1lb pie is maybe a pound give or take, and is part of the reason behind “the bakers dozen” which is 13 buns/rolls etc. Rather than go into it in depth, “I’ll pass the buck” with,

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wc/your-head-will-spin-naught-aught-and-ought/

[2] So yes the one expression covers both aspects of being bounded and inefficiency of work… So which way is your head spining 😉

Clive Robinson • July 19, 2023 9:14 AM

@ Winter,

“That is called “metallicity”, the quantity of matter that is not hydrogen. The older a star is, in life and generation, the lower the metallicity. The oldest, furthest, stars are almost pure hydrogen and helium with little or no heavier elements.”

Which means a curious thing…

Iron, is needed for life as we know it. But we also know it kills stars that are also needed for life as we know it.

Thus we know there was a time before turtles and there will be a time after turtles. Thus they can not go all the way down (back in time) nor all the way up (forward in time).

And nor can we in our current form.

But also we can draw a line that says there was not a sufficient diversity of elements to support life as the majority currently think of it…

Ignoring the “theology, philosophy” and similar we have the curious realisation that “life” is “a product of the evolution of the universe”

A necessary part of life is “competition” that occures on the flip side of “choice”. From competition we can show a natural progression to “privacy” or as others prefer security and secrecy (within the general meaning of the words).

From this we can show a logical transition from the physical to informational.

Thus a question arises as to will physical life cease in our universe or will it progress beyond the physical and if so will it be informational or something else?

Clive Robinson • July 19, 2023 9:38 AM

@ modem phonems, Winter,

“Everything has something before it, and that something wasn’t nothing, inchoate and formless, but has form or structure.”

But from what did that not “nothing” come from? and what will it become?

Do you believe in the imutability of entropy and evolution or that there are “road bumps” that change the pace if not the direction of the journy.

The logical implication of what you’ve said is either their was,

1, No origin.
2, There are infinate successive origins.

Either way you end up with a “string of pearls” or Mobious loop type scenario, that are effectively the same…

But still no answer to,

“From whence did it all come?”

“To where is it destined?”

Clive Robinson • July 20, 2023 4:19 AM

@ lurker, Bruce and the usual suspects,

AI LLM’s way to flaky to use.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/gpt4_chatgpt_performance/

Stanford University’s Prof James Zou in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Biomedical Data Science, ran a series of tests on ChatGPT and friends.

And found that the performance of thrse LLM’s went up and down unexpctedly and for commercial applications were sufficiently unreliable to be unacceptable in use for quite a number of applications especially where consistancy would be important.

Prof Zou said,

“We evaluated ChatGPT’s behavior over time and found substantial differences in its responses to the same questions between the June version of GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 and the March versions”

These changes were in things that should not realy change, such as indicatingvis if a number is prime or not. That is you would expect any change to be an improvment not a significant degradation.

The tests in March, and repeated in June were carried out on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5

GPT-4 apparently identified 97.6% of integers correctly when asked if they were prime in March but only 2.4% in June, a significant degredation.

GPT-3.5 however on the same test was 7.4% in March but 86.8% in June.

The question arising of course is,

“Why the change?”

Whilst we can make a generalised guess at “training data”, or “neural network” changes, only ChatGPT’s operators can detail the specifics to a useful level for diagnosis.

As Prof Zou noted,

“It is possible that tuning the model to improve its performance in some domains can have unexpected side effects of making it worse on other tasks”

If that is true… The implication against expectation is that,

“With LLMs their abilities can get worse with time”

Which is going to raise jokes along the lines of,

“AI means Aging Inbuilt.”

Or similar. But such a level of performance change, is going to appear to many as “Significant ‘bit rot'” thus make LLM’s inappropriate for use. After all as a business you do not want to pay eye wateringly sums of money and get a substantially less capable product for each iteration.

As Prof Zou notes,

“It’s important to continuously model LLM drift, because when the model’s response changes this can break downstream pipelines and decisions.”

Could be seen as a mild understatment, as others would view it as catastrophic.

He went on to say,

“We plan to continue to evaluate ChatGPT and other LLMs regularly over time. We are also adding other assessment tasks”

So as the old sayings have it,

“Watch this space with interest.”

And

“May you live in interesting times.”

Clive Robinson • July 20, 2023 7:15 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Kevin is sadly gone at too earlier an age.

It was not that long ago that he married Kimberly who he woked with.

https://about.me/kimberley.barry

It is to her, that taking forward Kevin’s memory and legacy falls to.

Clive Robinson • July 20, 2023 7:36 AM

@ The usual suspects,

This might be of interest,

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jafc.3c01072

Mind you I’d keep below the three drink minimum 😉

Clive Robinson • July 20, 2023 1:12 PM

@ lurker,

It’s not just your heart, it’s your sleep and digestive cycles as well.

Hence my “Keep below” warning 😉

But evidence suggests that it only takes about three days for your body to come to terms with Caffeines effects as far as feeling alert. So you are then drinking coffee just to stay as alert as if you’d not started drinking it…

Lets just say I’m a little sensitive to it, and made the mistake of drinking way to many cans of a well known brand of energy drink mixed with a well known type of clear spirit… To about the equivalent of a couple of quarts or so. Let’s just say I was wide awake to the point of being “bug-eyed and hyper-alert” for oh four days… It was a weird experience, I would not encourage.

So keep below the minimum…

Clive Robinson • July 20, 2023 4:35 PM

@ modem phonems, lurker, ALL,

Re : It’s all we’ve got fundementaly and it’s near usless.

“David Freedman in his books on statistical modeling suggests that fitting a general many variable model to data will not produce reliable results unless the model is derived from an understanding of the real nature of the data. The form of the model has to reflect the ”real” function that produces the data.”

First thing to note is how do you work with a “real function” that is in practice a poorly filtered random noise source?..

But to go back a few steps, when we are young and staring out the maths room window, we tend not to learn something important.

Which is what piecewise approximation is and what it can be used for and importantly it’s limitations and why realistically it should be treated like unexploded ordinance in a hole in the ground.

The important part of the lesson that goes woosh over many heads if even mentioned by the teacher –who’s head it may have gone woosh over as well– is that curve-fitting sits on a spectrum from unique curves to very general curves, and you realy need to know where your curve sits as that tells you just how big a bang it’s going to make when it blows up in your face (note I say “when” not “if”).

Almost as importantly is when you talk about real world curves, is that they suffer from a signal to noise issue no matter how you measure them. Thus you have to take care you are curve fitting to real signal rather than random noise that looks like a valid signal.

The way most remove noise is by “averaging it out”, but… to get an average you need a way to align the signal. So as a rough rule of thumb you look for a base signal and use that as a distinquisher and synchronizer. Which is fine if the entire signal aligns with it… Which mostly it does not in the real world…

To see why consider two signals that are synchronised “pulse trains” one of low frequency and moderate amplitude, the other of a higher frequency of small amplitude about the same as that of the noise.

If you use the base or first to synchronize, then the second will even if harmonically related to the base will tend to “average out” even if synchronized but not aligned on a cycle by cycle basis (which it won’t be if it carries information). To see this draw two narrow width pulses one of say 10 graph points appart, the second of say 9 graph points apart.

Over nine of the base cycles the second will walk back appearing at 9 the 8 then 7 then 6 and so on with respect to the base signal. So if you average to your base, it will get nine times it’s base pulse in hight but the second will average out to an offset or bias of an amplitude of one across the nine cycles…

So simple averaging does not always work, nor for that matter do all sampling systems, which nearly all measurments in the real world are.

The way you have to find the second signal is to remove the base signal then look for a distinguisher synchroniser for the second signal. But that assumes the second distinquisher is recognisable by the method you use to look for it. For instance if the second signal is “phase modulated” and effectively the pulse moves in time to a third signal… Yup you are back where you started.

It becomes clear after a little thought that a signal can only be found in noise if it is sufficiently extream and thus well distinquished against the noise. That is you know exactly what you are looking for and can accurately synchronize to all it’s parts (which as a consequence means no information is conveyed).

As I’ve indicated previously LLM’s are like having lots of filters that pick out parts of signals. The problem is there can never realy be enough filters for real world input of the type used.

Thus what you do is cheat. You accept the fact that the number of filters you can have is considerably less than the number you need. So you make the filter selectivity proportional to the number of times you find it in your training data.

That is the more a signal appears the wider the filter gets in it’s coverage spectrun. So when you hit it with a random noise signal it responds. But that wide filter will respond to more of the random noise spectrum than the other narrower filters.

Obviously as the number of filters you have is limited, some signals never get filters as they don’t cross the threshold to get into the limited set available.

Now this is where the fun happens. If your training data has the signals non uniformly distributed in the input (and it will). Then a filter can be built up quickly initially and remain even though it is considerably smaller in total than a signal that is uniformly distributed or is mainly at the tail end of the input training data.

Thus it’s not just averages that count in training data it’s the individual signal distributions as well… And as those signals are in no way synchronised or can be in a “general population” of data…

We’ve already seen this not only blight LLMs but also be used to deliberately distort their filter patterns that get called it’s weighted network or neural network etc etc etc.

The result is you can make what looks like “average data” decidedly malicious to say a “political mantra”. As the results of the now malicious filter become new training data the malicious bias becomes “baked in”.

The fact is LLMs are a bad idea, especially when the number of nodes or filters is small or worse small in range…

And guess what everyone is doing to save costs?

Yup they are reducing not just the number of nodes, but the range –bit width– of the weights… That is how they are “squeasing them down” to fit on a laptop or small number of servers with limited connectivity.

As @lurker mentioned above the Ex UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has made comment,

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66238004

What @lurker did not mention is who Nick Clegg now works for (meta) and what stake they have in LLM’s (Lalama) and who they are trying to pass it off too (Microsoft) as well as kicking it out into the Open Source movment, where it is almost certainly going to work as the proverbial “P0is0n Pi11”.

As they say “Just saying” where this is likely to go, before it gets flushed.

Clive Robinson • July 21, 2023 9:07 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Re : The problem with storing numbers.

“Depending upon precision, it can loop.”

Or oscillate indefinately depending on your view point’s chosen terminology. But mostly only in digital systems (not analog or mechanical).

But why does it happen? Is a question worth looking into even superficially as it has significant but mostly hidden away relevance to both Security via cryptography and fraud detection and more recently in “Digital Signal Processing”(DSP) and it’s related “Artificial Inteligence”(AI) especially in the weights of “Large Language Model”(LLM) “Artificial Neural Networks”(ANN), and can cause “horror of horrors” apparently unpredictable results especially if the summing/accumulating node and it’s non linear “compression / normalisation” functions if they are not correctly chosen and mapped will drop you in a whole world of hurt[1]…

So to kind of start at the begining,

One of the pieces of advice you hear early on in “maths” is,

“Use fractions not decimals they are more accurate”

Or when prefaced with “We” by an authorative figure –teacher– making it appear a fundemental rule, which, it is most certainly not. Whilst as an “approximate truism” it is true to a certain extent, it can get you unexpectedly into a whole world of hurt[1].

The usuall “explanation” is,

“Compare 1/3 to 0.333.. or “root 3″ to 1.732.. etc.”

Yes the decimal goes on for as long as you have space for, with each digit adding less than a tenth of the previous digit to the accuracy but always not hitting the target precisely. But change the representation base to one that is a multiple of three…

So it’s not an issue to do with the number, but how we represent it and thus the prime factors of the chosen representation base and number and those they have in common or don’t which can give rise to certain short cut “tricks”.

But the real issue with electronic devices is how much information can you actually store in it’s internal memory that is usually a string of bits representing a binary number. Well the number of different values are 2^N where N is the number of available bits gives an upper limit. (importantly note the representational base has only one prime factor “2” which makes the issue more obvious, and alows an automated trick that saves a “bit”).

But we should also ask,

“Do we use them all?” that is the full integer range?

To which the answer is “mostly no”.

To get a feeling as to why just multiply all the one digit decimals in the range 0..9 with each other and see how many unique results you get in the range 0..99. Obviously only the primes below 9 will be in there, but then when you consider prime factors of the digits you realise that you will not get numbers above 9 that do not have 2,3,5,7 as a factor.

But do you intuitavely expect it to be only 35 of the available hundred?

So nearly two thirds are unused, which is a lot of redundancy.

Further if you plot out the distribution you get an approximation to a well known curve. Do the same with multiplying two digit decimal numbers and the curve becomes more obvious…

Normallize against the first digit value and you can see why “Benford’s Law” –also called “first digit law”– happens. Not just for decimals but all number bases (and gets realy interesting for binary numbers). Just remember that it’s across the base range and effected by the primes and prime factors in that range.

As I’ve indicated before nature mostly works on “fractions of fractions” or “percentage growth” which is in part why the “use fractions…” is one of those “apparant truisms” that can lead to superficial thinking.

So just storing integers on average wastes a significent percentage of the available storage capability. Which is why “floating point numbers” are often used. In effect it “codes” the numbers to try and bring the distributions closer into agreement.

But even then numbers are still missing and the smaller the range the larger the percentage of missing numbers that can not be stored.

At some point you will need a number that can not be accurately stored, so all you can do is appoximate between two values.

The “Newton method to approxomate the root of a function” seeks an ever smaller difference –ie it’s “hunting in on zero”–, if the actual difference value can not be stored in memory it will fail. By in effect just cycling between close values that can be stored, without ever stopping…

To get around this the domain experts of an implementations cheat by replacing “test” with “mitigation”[2] (that can look the same)…

So in a computer or calculator that uses the Newton method, to do say square roots, the system designer needs to be aware that the least significant digits are probably “trash”… Which in turn has knock on effects quite rapidly, something the programmer implementing the system is probably unaware of…

[1] Last century and before this “world of hurt” was just in the information domain not the physical domain as maths did not have “physical agency” it only got it through “human agents” who contrary to what most think, are generally not a bunch of people looking to create hurt/harm (though “there are exceptions that prove the rule”). The issues first started showing up in “calculators” for navigation or firing solutions that were digital not analog / mechanical (and became of considerable concern when the pay-loads in autonomous delivery systems started to become “Physics Packages”). Now however we are in a world of “knock it out quick” digital electronics in all sorts of products with “physical agency” such as IoT and drones none of which get sufficiently tested[2] so the “World of hurt” is now very much in the physical domain.

[2] Why do we not see this issue with analog / mechanical calculators. Well simply unlike digital systems they are continuous and thus do not have the holes in the range digital systems have thus implicitly mitigate it. But secondly they are not very precice either, due to factors that “add noise, distortion, and bias” which the system implementers will easily see during protyping. But also analog and mechanical systems show “trends” predictably that can be easily tracked in each degree of freedom thus spotting it heading for the end stops or changing direction unexpectedly whilst not always trivial is relatively easy to do. In effect all you have to do is keep the previous value, and compare it to the current value and a direction / sign flag as well as compare the current value to values inside of the end stop values to ensure it’s “in range”. The same mitigations can be done in software, but is oh so often not in the likes of libraries and reusable code, because of the “perceived need for speed” and the assumption of “programer omnipotence” or just “knows what they are doing” which mostly they don’t. Why they don’t is obvious if you think about it… Mostly programmers are experts in the “software domain” but rarely are they experts in the “problem domain” they are writing the software for… And almost never are they experts in the “system domain” as it applies to software design of the code libraries they use…