Re: Re: Hacking's American as Apple Cider

[pageexec () freemail hu]

On 9 Sep 2005 at 19:17, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
> You [dave] write:
> > But hacking is clearly cool. So I don't get it.
>
> Convince me it's cool. If it's so "clearly cool" that ought to be pretty easy.

i thought it was pretty obvious as we have an analog situation with
cryptography. and you are not advocating a worldwide ban on public
crypto research and development, are you? in both hacking and crypto
we're finding and exposing flaws in someone's thinking (or lack thereof,
as it is often the case), and i don't see why that'd be the dumbest
idea. unless you want to live in a dumb world, that is.

an interesting consequence of your opinion is that unless you want to
admit to have practiced this dumbest idea yourself, you cannot know
what hacking is. so how can you have an opinion on it?

on the 'default permit' issue: it is not the dumbest idea, it is the
only way that can scale in systems. take a (not exactly big by any
measure) company with 1000 users and 1000 executable files that these
users need. that's an access control matrix with a million elements.
you tell me how you fill it in and maintain it in a way that is feasible
and cost effective in the long term. on the same line of thought, why
are all your executable files in your $PATH mode a+x? i thought that
was this dumbest 'default permit' idea too.