Posts by Right Angles

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Remember the Government's thinly-veiled campaign to discredit end-to-end encryption?

https://noplacetohide.org.uk/

Yes, you read that correctly, https.

Ex-CIO must pay £81k over Total Shambles Bank migration

Re: It's still highly unstable

And even when that happens, the status page still claims that everything is fine.

Python head hisses at looming Euro cybersecurity rules

Re: To pay or not to pay

That's more complicated. If you deliberately answered with information you knew to be incorrect and liable to cause death or injury then maybe you could be held liable, but if you gave genuine advice that someone else didn't follow exactly and that caused a crash then surely you aren't. But in neither case is Reddit responsible because they aren't a publisher.

To pay or not to pay

I can see where the FOSS people are coming from, but it often doesn't matter in terms of legal liability whether someone gets paid or not for what they are doing. For example, if I were driving a car carelessly and injured someone as a result, I'd have legal liability whether or not I was being paid to drive the car at the time. Similarly, if I as a private individual were directly distributing software to end users that caused (financial) injury, shouldn't I by the same argument have legal liability for that?

However, if, say, I just wrote a library that was being used by a company in a commercial product without any compensation to me, it only seems fair that the company should be liable in the first instance as they should have performed due diligence on my library before selling their product.