> Imagine a software engineer who has been asked to place a backdoor in some software.
I imagine such an engineer just gets a development plan and doesn't get to see the bigger picture, implying the backdoor. It might only get enabled on integration into a larger codebase, and nobody out of the loop will be able to extrapolate its existence from what they get to know for sure.
Hence I completely agree with the argument of shifting responsibility to the developers. Seems like MS is selling more of that eyewash again.
I disagree. I only have one point of data from past experience (not a backdoor, but working on a potentially unethical system), but I would say most developers know exactly what they are doing, or they know deep down but don't try to clarify in order to absolve themselves.
If we go back to backdoors, yes, sometimes, in the simplest cases (e.g. a "root" account), it might get in prod through trickery. But anything more complex and you need to know what you are trying to achieve.
I wonder why anyone would think inverting semantics like this was anything but asking for disaster.
With all the metaprogramming that is possible, will the matching Cat(age=age) even produce a coherent object that has an age argument passed to __init__? Do keyword arguments in those patterns work on properties? How will it compare to another cat, is that using "is" or __eq__?
Does Cat have to derive from the same type object?
def Cat(**kwargs):
return type("Cat", (), {"__init__": lambda self, **kw: ([setattr(self, k, v) for k, v in kw.items()], None)[-1]})(**kwargs)
Looming destitution never made good work. The way one engages with a good employer is a sense of co-ownership in some way. I can't tell how my way of taking ownership to an arbitrary project is influenced by a relief of financial stress. It might, but I don't believe it's going to up it any, ever.
Which means that with UBI, I might be less inclined to take risks. I'm not an economist enough to tell what that means, but a rough estimate say it won't increase my income. And at this point of the discussion, we haven't even touched the topic of taxes...
Personal experience. I put more into a job when I see a point in it, because I start to like it. When I don't find my work worthwhile or find interesting in any other way, it's not going to turn out good. What does it take for this? I don't know, maybe I'm screwing up the wording for it somehow.
Another band, Moonsorrow, covered a song called "Valkoakaasiat" (white acacia) in a crushingly heavy mood titled "Matkan lopussa" on their Kivenkantaja album. I heard it sung by a Finnish choir and think it may have originated in Russia, from a Soviet movie. I love this stuff, and pairing the modern incarnations with their original counterparts is kind of a cool sport.
The argument that BitTorrent had no legal applications is invalid. If people kill each other with guns, why would you put the blame on the gun company?
Popcorn apparently, if the MPAA is correct about the source code we now can't read, specifically helps users pirate movies.
To avoid cranking the discussion up to 11, let me recast your analogy to, "if people break into houses with crowbars, why would you blame the crowbar company?"
I think under the MPAA's argument, Popcorn is like a crowbar sold with a GPS device that finds unoccupied houses to break into.
I imagine such an engineer just gets a development plan and doesn't get to see the bigger picture, implying the backdoor. It might only get enabled on integration into a larger codebase, and nobody out of the loop will be able to extrapolate its existence from what they get to know for sure.
Hence I completely agree with the argument of shifting responsibility to the developers. Seems like MS is selling more of that eyewash again.