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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.

"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.

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Having secure browsers, encryption etc. actually clearly benefits the world. No “but think about the children/terrorists” please.

As our surroundings grow more secure, the justice system variant of swatting becomes a greater portion of the threats to worry about. There will be abuseable bugs and situations in our non static world, there is no way we'll ever have perfect security of anything. So a motivated actor with a grudge should be able to plant something a place you provably beyond reasonable doubt have sole control of, given enough time. How do you propose then that we secure deniability once the justice system is wielded as a weapon against the innocent, when everyone feels that there is no reasonable way defects exist and could have been used? Just look at the British post office scandal, real world justice systems have already operated under the assumption that software doesn't have bugs for decades, which speaks volumes on their inclination to believe that they both exist and are used by a unknown third party with ill intent. Thus the widespread trust in that things are secure is a threat in itself. And unlike airports we don't need the users to have an artificial sense of security for computers, networks, software, and digital services to be viable markets.

Brain dead moral relativism argument. The question is whether eg. a group trying to scam elders out of insurance money or a Columbian cartel to hack local politicians to do blackmail, or South Sudan to hack Darfur or whatever, should be allowed to compete with the companies making products for their own exploits.

99.999% of people will agree that reducing software vulnerabilities is desirable if they're able to understand the question, including the bad actors themselves a lot of the times.

The situations like bad state actors are already not bound by laws, and things like keeping activism legal are better fought for through other ways

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