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On 05/04/2014 18:29, Tim Bray wrote:
On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 1:50 AM, Stewart Bryant
(stbryant) < stbryant@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Please confirm that "friendly" implies that the user
gets to
> choose the degree of security privacy that they consider
> appropriate, and that their applications and devices are
not
> encumbered with the overheads unless they choose to
invoke
> the privacy and security mechanisms.
Here, I think, is a key issue. I disagree with Stewart.
WHAT?! How can I possibly disagree with
user choice?
Because, a huge majority of people
(a) aren’t aware that
there is a choice to be made, and shouldn’t need to be
(b) do not understand
the technical issues surrounding the choice, and shouldn’t
have to
(c) do not understand the legal/policy issues surrounding
the choice, and shouldn’t have to
This includes both the people who use online services and
the people who offer them. Thus, the only sane ethical
position is to operate in a mode that is private by default,
because the consequences of a negative failure (the user
really didn’t need privacy but got it anyhow) are immensely
less damaging than the consequences of a positive failure
(the user really needed privacy but didn’t get it).
I could be persuaded towards "crypto by default", but I hear in
these discussions "crypto as an exclusive mode", and I do not think
that is an acceptable constraint on implementations.
Privacy and authentication always ends up taking CPU, memory and
bandwidth, which in turn costs money, silicon, power, weight and
complexity. If a specific application requires privacy and or
authentication, then fine, but each case needs to be examined on its
own merits. Now you may say "ah but we are getting so much better at
the engineering that who cares about such things", to which I would
point out that such thinking stunts our ability to build things that
are orders of magnitude smaller, lighter, cheaper and more power
efficient than we can conceive of oday.
So please, let's not react to the recent news on spying, by creating
a security religion that in the end hurts us even more that the
problem we are reacting to.
Stewart
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