I would have my doubts that this were the real explanation. Maybe for a few people here and there, but most techies that I know wouldn't mind things being much easier. I think it's more of a stubbornness and resistance to change, maybe with a little bit of laziness in the realm of "I don't want to have to relearn things." And as you say, "I've developed some ways to make my life easier, and I don't want to re-develop them all."

Of course, there's also the possibility that some of the new ways of doing things are actually not as good as the old. That can happen too. All of these things can happen, but I don't know many IT people who actually go looking for ways to create job security. For most of us, the "laziness" overcomes that, and we're overloaded enough with other work that we're just looking to make things as easy as possible.

Maybe just that they want an audience...?

So you're saying, "You can't claim that there's no value in watching the video unless you've seen it." On the face of it, it seems reasonable. But then, if I were to claim that there's no value in watching it, then why would I have watched it? If I had chosen to watch it of my own accord, then it would actually undercut my argument that there's not value in watching it. Obviously I would have thought that there was *some* value, or I wouldn't have watched it.

It's a little like saying, "I'm against gun control, but don't even argue with me unless you own a gun. If you don't own a gun, then you don't understand guns, and so you should just stay out of the conversation." It kind of almost sounds sensible until you think about it.

I think, rather, that it falls on you, as someone who has seen it, to explain what value I would get from watching it. Other than a sadistic juvenile rubberneckinig enjoyment from seeing something awful, what would I get out of watching it?

You know, I've thought about why this is the case, and here are a couple of thoughts that I had:

1) With all we've found out about big businesses cooperating with the NSA, I wouldn't be too surprised if the NSA had, in some ways, actively discouraged security and encryption.

2) I think part of the problem is coming up with, agreeing on, and an implementing a set of standards. We don't do standards anymore. Everyone has little walled gardens. We're not going to come up with better email standards, for example, because the days of everyone wanting to agree on protocols like SMTP and POP3 and IMAP are over. Now Google wants to have its own email standards and protocols, Microsoft wants to have its own, and Facebook wants to have its own. You aren't going to get those companies together into a room, working towards a better solution that they can all use. Even if you had a better protocol all worked out, they wouldn't use it. It's a combination of "not invented here" syndrome and "I want to control the patents and the infrastructure" and finally, "I don't even want people to be able to communicate with people on my service unless they also sign up for my service."

3) People prefer to do nothing than to undertake change. Fixing things takes effort, and your attempts to fix things might not go according to plan. As long as nobody important to yelling at them to get things fixed, a lot of people would rather sit back and watch things fall apart.

Common sense will never come into style, and "they" will never hire people to think and actually produce useful/actionable insights. You see, it's a bit of a catch-22. No one will make good decisions until someone sensible is in charge, but we'll never put sensible people in charge until we've started making good decisions. It's ignorant sociopaths all the way down.

Did you not read the summary, even?

Yes, ultimately physical security is always an issue. They can try to make the devices difficult to access, but as you've pointed out, that's always going to be a problem.

But this is a different level of "insecure". These things are controlled through open, unencrypted wireless networking. There are no passwords. It's like the difference between saying, "Your home is never completely secure, since someone can always break a window or crowbar the door open," vs. "Let's just leave our valuables sitting out on the lawn, completely unattended."

I don't know. I my experience, a lot of poor security isn't caused by incompetence. It's caused by someone saying, "But that will cost more money..." or "That will take too much time..." or "But I want to buy from this supplier because the owner is my brother-in-law..."

I mean, they don't necessarily say those things out loud, but those are often the reasons. It's not necessarily that they're too dumb to understand that it's bad security. They just don't care. They're not thinking about the potential for problems down the road. They're not thinking about long-term maintenance. They're not really thinking about public safety. They're just thinking about, "I have to get this job done in a way that makes my life better/easier. I want to work less and make a big bonus."

Not that I work in a traffic-related industry. That's just been my general professional experience as to why security is usually terrible.

No, it's scary how much we still don't care about security. These things could definitely be fixed, we just don't care to fix them. We don't demand security in the first place, we aren't willing to pay for security, and we aren't really willing to fix security when it's broken. People will run around looking for blood for 5 minutes when it's discovered that there are huge security flaws, but nobody will fix them.

Remember all the news when it was discovered that a person could easily and untraceably hack voting machines? Do you think that was ever fixed? The way we use credit cards is insecure. Most email is unencrypted. We use Social Security Numbers as both an identifier and a form of authentication.

Most of what we do is completely insecure, and it's actually kind of amazing how rarely people take advantage of it. But it's really disturbing that we aren't remotely willing to secure things that would be relatively easy to secure, and would solve lots of problems.

It seems like it might work better to say, "San Francisco still sucks-- which might not be so bad, depending on which side of the glory hole you sit."

It makes me suspicious that you weren't around in the 90s. That's not what web application UIs looked like.

About 40,000 people die in car accidents every year, in the US alone. It's one of those things that I keep pointing out because people keep seeming to fail to realize how many people that is. When people say, "We can't have solar power because it'll kill a thousand birds!" or "We can't have freedom (i.e. NSA spying and CIA torture is ok!) because otherwise we might have another 9/11, which killed a thousands of people!"

40,000 people die every year due to car accidents. Nobody is talking about giving up cars.

Before we allow AI on the road, we'll need to have some kind of regulation on how the AI works, and who has what level of liability. This is a debate that will need to happen, and laws will need to be made. For example, if an avoidable crash occurs due to a fault in the AI, I would assume that the manufacturer would have some level of liability. It doesn't make sense to put that responsibility on a human passenger who was using the car as directed. On the other hand, if the same crash is caused by tampering performed by the owner of the car, then it seems that the owner would be liable.

As far as I know, even these simple laws don't explicitly exist yet.

Normal cars also make it easier to commit terrorist acts and other crimes. So what? I mean, yes, let's consider whether we want to take special safeguards and regulations regarding AI cars, but this shouldn't be something to go crazy worrying about.

Yes, I agree completely. I do kind of hate coming back from vacation to a huge inbox, but on the other hand, I do things like emailing someone saying, "I know you're on vacation and I don't want you to do anything now, but I know I'll forget if I don't send this now. When you get back..."