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Comment by gweinberg | Hacker News Reader

Bad analogy. Hijacking isn't caused/enabled by a plane having more passengers than it was designed to carry. Why do people admire this sort of thing? If he wants to argue that we should focus on strengthening cockpit doors rather than passenger screening, fine. But does anyone actually think the spurious analogy to buffer makes his argument more compelling?

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Yeah! Hijacking is a failure of type systems due to dynamic dispatch. Plane control should have been restricted to only statically defined pilot values.

Yeah! Hijacking is a failure of type systems due to command injection. Properly typed planes world fail to allow passenger actions to be interpreted as pilot actions.

To prevent these threats, the TSA should confiscate bad analogy guns or at least validate strict isomorphism.

(And as far as the article goes, it's not even correct. Your "data" includes closures/function pointers/whatever and if that data gets corrupted you could get the program to call into the wrong function.)

Analogies are a good spur for creativity, even if they have to be sanity-checked afterward. Someone who didn't already know that cockpits are sealed might consider it by relating hijacking to buffer overflows. Your own analogies both suggest that some way of binding "pilotability" to the actual pilot would be useful -- maybe a retinal scan or DNA check before activating the controls.

The only thing worse than an aircraft controlled by a hijacker is an aircraft piloted by no one at all because the security system locked out the legitimate pilots. I'd give this a resounding NOPE.

Thank you, because I'm wondering that myself (and I submitted the story!). I didn't post it as a story because it was a good one. More to see exactly how deep HN has gone into parts unknown to see what happens when "presented without comment" really is presented without comment. "It's just after September 11th, so I'm going to talk about how the world should be more like my favorite programming language" is at best wacky and that that didn't get picked up before your post is interesting to me.

Well, I'm glad to hear that. But now I feel like kind of a dummy, because I assumed that then article was submitted approvingly, and I expected to get down votes and hate replies. Sometimes it's good to be wrong.

Yeah...I wanted to disclaim it, but that would have defeated the purpose of the post. :-)

I wish people used analogies less. Because often analogies are either bad, or at some point stretched. And in most cases, dealing with the subject directly is more straightforward and less prone to misinterpretation.

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