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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

Is this Brian White for real?

Host: Who could exploit this vulnerability...? White: Those that have significant resources, for instance, Google... (mentions nation-states much later)

Nice FUD there.

White: what is important here, there are no known attacks ongoing right now...

Nice argument from ignorance there.

White: there is a lot of things we don't know but it reinforces two things to me, one is that increasingly the software we are operating is quite secure, coz now we are looking at kernel level problems...

Nice false cause fallacy.

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You should argue the points, not label the fallacies. Would you rather White say “well there’s probably attacks, but no one knows!”? This is just as incorrect as his statement, the problem being that /no one knows./

The FUD is real though.

I disagree with you. Labeling fallacies is shorthand for calling them out. When reading PR or news, I prefer to read a quick breakdown of the syllogisms BEFORE I go into technical details.

> I prefer to read a quick breakdown of the syllogisms

Do you have a link for a good one?

Arguing logical fallacies is a waste of time and effort.

They are things that never should have been said in the first place because they're only made to deflect, detract, or support a nonsensical argument.

If you get caught up in trying to defend against these things you've already fallen into their trap.

People frequently use logical fallacies in good faith, usually because they're falling for one of the many permutations of the law of averages, using associative logic/magical thinking, or just have some axiomatic beliefs that they believe are somehow sinful/wrong to scrutinize due to their religion/loyalty.

Very true, I think the point still stands though that the best thing to do is to point them out rather than to try and argue them.. otherwise you end up legitimizing the discussion and going off on some irrelevant tangent rather than debating something worthwhile.

Yup. Big difference between rhetoric and an intellectually honest discussion.

"If you're explaining, you're losing." -- Lee Atwater

I've heard security researchers make the last claim. Especially with the increasing use of fuzzing, ASLR, etc., trivially exploitable buffer overflows and other things of that nature are much less common now.

But still extremely common. SQL injection is my favorite one. We've had a good solution for it for ages. But look at CVEs and you will still see loads of SQL injection.

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