Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This is a pervasive mainframe problem too.
I have not heard the term used recently, but for obvious reasons IBM marketing people used to prize what they called 'hardware hawks' very highly. A hardware hawk was a customer executive whose unvarying response to any and all problems was to throw more hardware at them. In the short term this tactic often works. In the slightly longer term its use yields systems that become progressively harder and harder to maintain and all but impossible to replace. Looking at the litany of vulnerabilities documented in the posts I receive from us-cert.gov has convinced me that almost every application and all systems software needs to be rewritten ab initio. They were designed, to the extent that they were designed, in a simpler time. They reflect the assumption that most of their users will be benign, with only a few being prerternaturally stupid and a few others bent on theft. The only appropriate assumption now is that all users are bent upon subverting and/or destroying the systems they use. This assumption is of course hyperbolic: some users will always be too lazy or too unimaginative to do much damage. It is nevertheless necessary. The work of Rufus Isaacs on aircraft-collision avoidance, which I have mentioned here before, is highly instructive. He found that the only safe collision-avoidance strategies for aircraft A in an air space also occupied by aircrafts B, C, D, . . . were based upon the assumption they were hellbent on colliding suicidally with it. This weekend, for the first time in a very long time, I looked at a stream of problem reports for a compiler. (It was a C compiler, but that is not important.) What struck me about them was that most of those that involved syntactically constructs reflected 'bizarre' uses of the language that would not occur to anyone who was proficient in it. The only way to cope with such deficiencies is to generate syntactically correct constructs, however absurd, mechanically/programmatically for testing. Here, as elsewhere, malice and ignorance are often very difficult to disentangle. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
