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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

I think what's holding back the correct firewalls, mailers, etc is that the whole computing landscape is so unsound, and fixing just one level of the stack doesn't give big payoffs. And the market mechanism doesn't know how to climb that hill especially since it's been baked into people's assumptions and mental models.

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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

   Donald Knuth

> doesn't give big payoffs.

I think that's the key here. The idea that proving things correct means they are flawless is...fancyful. And the expense is very high.

Lack of security is likely working as intended, be it on the system level or with encryption often relying on certificate authorities. Fixing any of this would likely result in the intelligence agency threat scenario of "going dark". Its the brave new world we live in where zerodays are valuable investments for governments.

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