Re: comparing information security to other industries

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:16:29 PST, KT said:
> So we have been dealing with information security from last 20 years and
> still the world is at large lost. We still see banks vulnerable to
> trivial XSS attacks and software broken by buffer overflows. How do we
> compare to other industries like construction, engineering, finance?
> What I am trying to figure out is how mature we are and how long will it
> take for to get stable?

20 years after the first automobile, we'd gotten as far as a Model A or T
or so.

Learning the ins and outs of stone arches took a millenium.  And then when
steel became available, it took several decades to learn that.

Finance?  When was Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", and how long did
THAT take to really get understood? (For bonus points, how many centuries
between the first use of abstract counters as money, and Smith's understanding
of it? Why did *that* take so long?)

Science?  Einstein had a great year in 1905.  How many people understood
it by 1925?

(Incidentally, the fact that we still have a lot of security issues isn't
actually a software problem, so much as an innate lack of tools to help
humans understand *any* complex system, be it software, or the economy,
or global climate, or....)

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