I worked with systems ‘used by The Government’. They were secure! Even from those trying to use them. 
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I don’t blame Microsoft! They had help. Hence the ‘et al’ appended to the culprits identity. I just don’t have the insight of a Royal Commission or Grand Jury or FBI Special Investigator to Name all of the related parties.
When attributing blame or having contributed to an outcome, whether it was by a deliberate and conscious act or just an unintended consequence - Ignorance is no excuse. Perhaps you don’t know what you can’t foresee if you choose to look in another direction.
Consumer law is meant to help us remedy situations arising from large powerful corporates choosing not to look or worse deliberately look the other way. I see many parallels between what may evolve around legal liability and corporate avoidance of ensuring they delivered security to our online world, the harm it has and will cause to many of us in the future, and how the James Hardy asbestos products saga has played out to date.
We are still living and dealing with the fall out from the later. Are we adequately in control of the former? I suspect not hence my comments that what we say here needs to add to our consumer outcomes.
I can reminisce about mentally converting a LODZ r1 to its binary or hex or octal equivalent. It might make me feel young again and sound like some expert. I’m really just another dumb consumer who sees a moral and real threat that we should not have to carry the burden of weak consumer law, or lack of political resolve. Choice is now much more than an independent review organisation. It does have a profile and a clear presence in the community.
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Ignorance is always the first excuse!
“I’m shocked, shocked to find there’s gambling in these premises.”
“Your winnings, Capitaine.”
More broadly, lacking clear laws companies will do what they can get away with in pursuit of the profit motive - as they are expected to do by corporate law! Similarly, they do not have morals - unless as a point of difference/marketing opportunity. Companies are not allowed to do anything that reduces returns to the shareholders, and I suggest that this is the problem you should be railing about.
Corporate law beats consumer law pretty much every time, with every small consumer win seemingly offset by a major loss. We live in a society that worships money, and those who have it, and ignore what hand luck played in getting them there. Our politicians have their hands tied, because one wrong move and there could be a massive sell-off of our currency - or share markets! I am currently reading False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, by John Grey - and he puts forward a very convincing argument that governments can do very little to ‘manage’ economies without having the huge investment community ‘on side’. This was in 1998 - things have not improved since then.
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I reckon things are probably running precisely to plan 
no improvement needed …
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Ah yes. Programming Fortran on these punch cards at uni early 70’s.
1 week batch turn-around if lucky. When busy, 2-3 weeks; only to find I had made a coding mistake. Sift through the tractor print out to find the error, replace the faulty line of code with a new card. Wait… repeat cycle until program ran.
Operators all had to wear white lab coats.
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You may enjoy this tale. I did.
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They’re currently short £256 on their $5,000 GoFundMe 
. (Link is to their blog, which in turn links to the fund-raiser.)
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How life has changed in programming.
'Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions. ’
The cynics will respond to the ‘were ever known’ as a caveat, but a point is made about how coding has changed. So-called computer scientists have done their share to contribute to bug laden code by developing and entrenching techniques to make coding simpler and more reliable.
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I think she may have been one of the last to use this approach … people substitute a number of other words for ‘rigorous’ these days …
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Two points:
- She wasn’t working in a commercial environment where the pressure is on to ‘get something out the door, and fix it later’. (There have been programs shipped on CD/DVD in recent decades when as soon as you install they go and download the new bug-fixes.)
- The Apollo computers had RAM sufficient for 2,048 16 bit words and storage for 38,864 16 bit words. My figures put that as a total of 40,912 bits, or just over 5KB. A simple modern program will take far more than this, and in fact a backup of my browser ad filter settings takes 7KB! As complexity grows, so do errors.
While it is possible to write bug-free code, the cost is currently prohibitive. You also need to consider what constitutes a ‘bug’ as opposed to a ‘feature’.
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Ok, I’m feeling a little nerd like and will lead with my chin here. Happy to be corrected.
Edit note: per link to Wikipedia actual ROM is listed as 36,864 words. Them sneaky 6’s and 8’s.
I think that is 36,864 (corrected for minor typo in prior great post 38,864) words x 16bits of ROM that would have held the program code. IE 36k of 15bit parity ROM.
The RAM (magnetic core/bubble memory) is only 2k of 15bit parity memory.
The ROM was hand made with each bit state determined by how the core rope memory was physically constructed/bound. Not a simple task to reflash like an EEPROM, and certainly high risk if you tried to flash anything else while the ROM was being programmed.
And if the code had a bug or a ROM bit failed there was no simple on the fly code fix.
Yes, you could equate this to bytes in modern code, counting the parity bit as a normal data bit. (2 + 36) x 2 = 76kB.
There was no virtualisation, multi-core processor, or threaded or parallel execution to confuse the programming.
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He who has not but dares should have a long and slow read. If not for most coders never having had the lessons, wagging OS 101 (protect yourself from the users is job 1), and the nesting and blind reuse of common core libraries, some poorly thought out and others pushed out by the management to meet a deadline, even quite complex applications should be able to be written.
It is also worth noting some features are worse than just bugs. (credit to the 737max flight control)
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Which reminds me of something I heard about the other day. If you use Ruby, you may want to check your gems.
It is also worth considering the problem in iOS a few years ago, when the insertion of a single character caused the system not to do a security check that was expected. My memory suggests it was a space, but others may correct me.
Here is an example of easy to make, potentially incredibly damaging modern programming errors. (Disclaimer: I am not a programmer, so cannot confirm the usefulness or otherwise of the underlying intent.)
Thank you for the correction. While it is a change in orders of magnitude, 80kB remains extremely small in modern programming - when an operating system is normally a minimum of several GB. Even TAILS is over 1GB.
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An article regarding the Apollo 11 onboard computer.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/machine-made-moon-missions-possible-022918335--spt.html
Things were ‘modern’ when I first wrote code in a commercial environment - we had all of 28k, and 4k of overlay if we needed to … we rarely did I wonder where they would have stored the emoticons !!! you know, not the ASCII variant, the horrible graphic types 
(for the uninitiated, that is the characters colon-r-o-f-l-colon - I’d give it to you in octal, but who the heck would know …).
I have a small collection of memorabilia on my bookshelf - old drive parts (from drives the size of washing machines), 4k memory card half the size of a chopping board, vampire taps, ceramic hard drive, 2400ft tapes, and this, my favourite … haven’t counted up the memory 
closer in so you can see those cool little cores
Aren’t they cute? I posted this previously but thought a close-up might be appropriate.
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You are welcome. Noted the 6’s and 8’s played a few tricks on the eye too. My mind as well!
What they achieved is still incredible given the tech they had in the 60’s.
You can do a significant amount with very little.
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I probably have many of them from rtty in the old days
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ASCII artwork!
They often took on a persona all of their own with a typical drum printer never quite able to print a perfect straight line.
‘ bung.dat’ the perpetually drunk court jester from the Wizard of Id cartoon was a favourite.
On the days of more secure computing, it might be fair to suggest there were never any known exploits for analogue computers. The need for a degree of manual configuration probably assured that outcome. Aided by the lack of the internet, or limited portability of 1MB removable hard disks in the digital hybrid versions.
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