Small world

[maradydd]

There's a post up on BoingBoing today (ok, yesterday for me) about open vs. closed search algorithms, suggesting that the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo et al are bad because of their lack of transparency. It invokes a comparison to an important concept in computer security: "security through obscurity" is dangerous because an effective encryption scheme should be equally hard to break whether you know the internals of the algorithm that generated the ciphertext or whether you don't.

I think comparing this to search is a bad (or at best misleading) idea, and expounded on this in the comments. But I'm far more entertained by the fact that the two best comments on the post so far come from two sources with whom I am tangentially familiar, albeit from totally different directions: jrtom and radtea. Small damn world!

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

*shrug* KML has seen a sudden upswing in users over the last few weeks, and they're filing bug reports like there's no tomorrow -- and tracking them down to their origin in the source. I certainly appreciate it; it makes my job easier.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Functionality bugs and security bugs are different. How many of these bugs are ones that do not affect functionality, but only affect security? I suspect very few.

(And as a side note: KML means "Keyhole Markup Language." You need a new name...)