Been my experience that the usual way things are shaken out for “idiot” resistance is to turn a group of kids loose on it. Kids seem to take it as a real challenge to prove that they can “break” anything. And great delight when they figure out how to get past all the guardrails and defenses and manage to leave the adults shaking their heads.
I once worked for a testing company that built hydro-mechanical equipment for testing structures and equipment. One of our software engineers claimed that he finally had made the software drivers for his test device “perfect and fool-proof”. “Can’t misuse it!” he claimed. With a supervisor’s permission, I brought my (rather bright) 8-y-o son in.
Son had been playing with a real-life, honest-to-goodness personal computer since he was 4, and using my PC clone since he was 5. In about 50 seconds he had the engineer looking in utter horror at the scrap pile of the $1,000 test device. The boy knew how to obtain ‘Root’ (system supervisor) privileges, and he then directly commanded the system to bypass the safeguards and overload itself. Engineer had forgotten to include a password lockout on the ‘Root’ command.
PS: Son is now the top antivirus “call for help” supervisor for an international dairy products company.
jandjdevore 4 months ago
Same thing with the weapons in the middle east.
John Wiley Premium Member 4 months ago
Idiot resistant, at best. No such thing as idiot proof.
P51Strega 4 months ago
Manned aircraft are NOT drones.
markkahler52 4 months ago
Hope crotch protection is in play!
wellis1947 Premium Member 4 months ago
There is no such thing as “idiot-proof” – every time we think we’ve developed such a thing; a new crop of “idiots” comes along to prove us wrong…
mlambo49 4 months ago
The best is yet to come as they have a lot more technologies than they are telling us about.
SrTechWriter 4 months ago
Been my experience that the usual way things are shaken out for “idiot” resistance is to turn a group of kids loose on it. Kids seem to take it as a real challenge to prove that they can “break” anything. And great delight when they figure out how to get past all the guardrails and defenses and manage to leave the adults shaking their heads.
I once worked for a testing company that built hydro-mechanical equipment for testing structures and equipment. One of our software engineers claimed that he finally had made the software drivers for his test device “perfect and fool-proof”. “Can’t misuse it!” he claimed. With a supervisor’s permission, I brought my (rather bright) 8-y-o son in.
Son had been playing with a real-life, honest-to-goodness personal computer since he was 4, and using my PC clone since he was 5. In about 50 seconds he had the engineer looking in utter horror at the scrap pile of the $1,000 test device. The boy knew how to obtain ‘Root’ (system supervisor) privileges, and he then directly commanded the system to bypass the safeguards and overload itself. Engineer had forgotten to include a password lockout on the ‘Root’ command.
PS: Son is now the top antivirus “call for help” supervisor for an international dairy products company.