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Comment by kitanata | Hacker News Reader

Fine them $1500 per account breached, per PII attribute taken. From the other posts it looks like at least 4 attributes were taken. So that is $1500 x 4 x 37M = $222B. I think $222B is a paltry sum compared to the amount of damage that was probably caused by this, but let’s settle for $222B anyway. Breaches like this should end the company forever and the C-Suite should go to prison for criminal negligence. I am sick and tired of this.

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Alright, sure. But you need to prove negligence. It's impossible to write perfect code right? You really have to prove whatever breach/error happened wasn't on purpose and wasn't due to gross negligence.

Imagine a world where all software is written using formal methods [1], that would be heaven.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods

Heaven if you like living in a world where it takes months to ship even simple software. Don't get me wrong, I think we're too sloppy most of the time, but it's a trade off, not one sided.

Maybe it's not such a good idea to run so much critical stuff through systems built in weeks...

I was responding to

> Imagine a world where all software is written using formal methods

(emphasis mine)

I would be much more agreeable to enforcing higher quality for more important things, including ex. systems that store PII for large numbers of people.

This would kill hacking and experimentation.

> Last year, Bellevue, Washington-based T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million and spend an additional $150 million to upgrade data security to settle litigation over a cyberattack in 2021 that compromised information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people.

And they were still breached. "gross negligence" definitely comes to mind.

Ancient Rome was filled with unsound residential development that yielded a lot of profits to anyone with means and influence to erect buildings. They would regularly collapse but common people had little access to legal protection.

Now we have strict building codes and thousands of buildings with dozens upon dozens of floors that can resist hurricanes and earthquakes.

Software development is barely 3 generations old. One day we will have sound engineering and fairly solid systems on a scale we can't even fathom today. But it will take a lot of collective learning. For now rickety systems can hoover enough value for their owners that they are still getting built all over the place.

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