Reply to post: Physical vs Digital

Wassenaar weapons pact talks collapse leaving software exploit exports in limbo

Milton

Physical vs Digital

It's relatively difficult to smuggle physical weapons around, and happily, the more dangerous they are, then in general the harder to infiltrate. Shifting a vanload of assault rifles is much harder than sneaking a small handgun, but infinitely easier than trucking a nuke. Plus there are lots of methods for detecting dangerous physical items: fluoroscopy, gamma ray scanners, chemical detectors, dogs etc.

None of these things holds true for code. It's barely the work of a minute to encrypt a file as random bytes. Or steganograph it into a photo album or music library. Just post a photo on a public service, even.

So perhaps instead of wasting effort trying slam the stable door, intelligent lawmakers (yeah, I know, stop laughing) should be working on schemes such as regulation of IoT manufacturers do they cannot sell unsecured, vulnerable rubbish?

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