At 11:42 2/7/2002, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>Burglary at the broken window level is alive and well. Therefore there's
>little point to putting locks on doors.
>
>I hope the fallacy of the above is obvious, but when translated into the
>computer security domain it's all too common a rationalization, as this
>thread demonstrates.
I disagree. Suggesting that many of the benefits of the Unicode encoding
model should be abandoned because they might be abused is like saying
'Burglary at the broken window level is alive and well. Therefore there's
little point in possessing anything.' Of course there is a point to putting
locks on doors, but that is analogous to putting locks on e-mail, not to
obsessing about one potential security problem in one particular software
standard. If you were able to fix all the 'flaws' in Unicode, you would a)
be left with a less useful character encoding standard, b) still be facing
all the remaining security holes in all the remaining software standards
and applications, and c) have done nothing to combat user ignorance and
gullibility just waiting to be taken advantage of.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
