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I'm not sure why we should even dignify questions about egotism or how we're discouraging developers from learning. Those issues just aren't relevant. You either built a system that resists attacks or you don't. As Daniel J. Bernstein once said, that may sound harsh, but that's engineering.



They're relevant because security is social as well as technical. If you want the systems that your friends or relatives use to be more secure, then you can't just dismiss someone who may be implementing those systems. Okay, fine, if they're just insulting you, keep moving.

I responded to dignify it because I thought that in spite of the invective, there's a valid point about whether the article is helpful to the people it's meant to reach. The title is needlessly insulting to the reader. The tl;dr is pretty useless. You don't learn to do things right by cargo culting a mantra that you don't understand. The content of the tl;dr should be the block quote starting under "That said, what modes should you be using?"

Yes, you're right, this is actually pretty irrelevant to the content of the article and the question of whether a particular system is secure. I think it connects to a larger issue about security education that's lurking out there, though, and the article is clearly meant to educate.


But in such a case, engineering trumps social.


Can you be more specific about which case you're referring to?




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