| ▲ | pjmlp 8 hours ago |
| People have to successfully get through a state exam in order to drive cars in first place, can be jailed, get fined when not driving them safely, or forbidden for life to ever drive again. People that accidentality cut their fingers in lawnmowers due to lack of safety features are allowed to sue the lawnmower company. What I would agree is that it is about time computing gets the same liability laws that the rest of the world already has in place and no EULAs that work around local laws should be considered valid in any form or shape. |
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| ▲ | voakbasda 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Do you hate open source and want only projects where their authors can afford liability insurance and are willing to put themselves in the firing line of a legal system that can be both arbitrary and capricious? Because that’s what you seem to want. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even people selling on the street or doing charity work have to account for liability of their actions. Lets stop talking about open source as special snowflakes where everything is excused. | | |
| ▲ | voakbasda 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And that’s how you prevent bake sales, lemonade stands, and more. You create a barrier to entry that gets raised little by little until only the biggest players can afford the game. Software liability would end all small open source projects. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Bake sales and lemonade stands are perfectly fine as long as people don't land on hospital urgency, due to careless work on preparing them with spoiled ingredients or lack of hygiene. Lets strive for quality in software. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Now do that again without careless work or spoiled ingredients. Do you still want them punished or facing so much regulation they can't exist? Because you'll definitely get that with software; even really good development will have flaws, and single flaws can lead to a thousand or million hacks. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | All humans face scrutiny in their interactions with others. Software only got this bad, because we educated users broken tools are acceptable and fixable with computer reboots and anti-virus. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I dunno, people seem to accept most kinds of tool being fussy or flaky. But the special thing about security flaws is that they turn a one in a billion error into a guaranteed attack. It's moderately hard to make something that doesn't feel buggy, but ridiculously hard to be secure. If you hold to the standards of a bake sale it's the former. If you want full security then nobody releases anything outside very strict contracts. | | |
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| ▲ | esikich 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The problem is it's literally speech. Selling something isn't speech, you do not have the right to do charity work or run a business. It goes even beyond speech, it's closer to pure math/logic and I feel very uncomfortable about regulating that. I also think it's literally impossible. | | |
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| ▲ | dml2135 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >People that accidentality cut their fingers in lawnmowers due to lack of safety features are allowed to sue the lawnmower company. Anyone is allowed to sue the lawnmower company. Did they win? |
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| ▲ | lightedman 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The amount of "Do not put hands here" labels I've seen on lawnmowers would suggest that, yes, someone did sue and win (or at the least got a settlement) and thus the lawyers forced the companies to put disclaimers and warnings on the lawnmower, directly on the top of the deck in plain sight. |
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| ▲ | close04 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| On power tools, appliances, etc. the safety features are at the user's latitude to bypass. They are usually a hint (don't microwave your dog), not a hard barrier ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"). A spinning blade is covered by a grill you can trivially remove without permission from anyone. I agree that the defaults should be secure, but you can't force security on people without creating parallel issues which are maybe worse. Centralizing this power in a single point can have orders of magnitude bigger blast radius than a security failure on an app. At some point users have to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions. We can't just infantilize them forever as if a magical hand will always be over them protecting and having their best interest in mind. And we certainly shouldn't punish every user for the sake of some of them. The worst part is that Google gets the benefit of putting itself as the central point of control over the ecosystem based on a promise to keep users safe, but without any of the liability from failing to keep that promise. When the app store is chock full of malware I'm really starting to suspect that their goal is actually only the control. And all those people defending it with "but people don't know better, they need a hand to guide them" were equally misled. What do you think? |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and when they fail to do so, there are laws in place for liability of third party, or when their own irresponsible actions affects others. |
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