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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

Ya so if some kid whose 16 is messing around on his computer figures out some cool app starts publishing it and then bam the incumbents can smack him down.

The regulations are designed to deepen the software moat, and security theater, and I say this as an InfoSec professional.

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If the same kid decides to throw a party, train their cooking abilities and everyone ends up on hospital due to some stuff they cooked, they will have lots of fun talking to police officers.

This is nonsense, because non-commercial activities are exempt from the CRAs requirements.

Yes and regulation will ensure non-commercial activities stay that way. I write open source code because I love building software tools and there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to commercialize my work. I'd love it if an opportunity ever came along one day to get rich building a tool, that I could pounce on, in which case I'd love to know that I wouldn't immediately get jumped and mobbed by regulators.

"Yes, I would like to sell commercial software, but bear no responsibility for the software I'm selling".

If you cook for your friends, but then decide to open a commercial kitchen, do you think you will be exempt fromfood safety regulations?

I'm not exactly building bridges or x-ray machines, or putting food in anyone's mouth. Right now I'm building programs that generate text, and it isn't even real text like in a book that could potentially fall off a shelf and injure someone, we're talking about digital words on a computer that no one except nerds used to care about and anyone is still free to ignore, except normies won't if see an opportunity to rentseek the harmless builders doing it.

Too much ranting, too little sense. Are you sure you haven't generated it with your generator? ;)

You're trying to carve out an exception for you yourself specifically because you assume that your special case is too special.

1. Laws don't usually work that way

2. There are innumerable cases when "innocuous" software is used as an attack vector precisely because "we don't do nothing why would we keep our software secure"

3. In EU you're safe until you really screw up. More discussion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38819780

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