News You Can Bruise for 2004 June 25

I always complain to Seth that bad laws get passed and laws get passed with stupid loopholes because the people who draft the laws think "This brilliant law will solve our problem!" and don't think about attacks that use that very law for some undesirable purpose. The way good programmers think about hostile-user attacks against every design and implementation decision they make.

I know what you're thinking: "Great, another hacker trying to use the hammer of technology to hit the non-nail of law. Also, he has poor personal hygiene!" Well, hear me out before you judge, hoo-mon. My personal hygiene is actually quite good, and look at this hypothetical complaint constructed by the EFF to demonstrate how awful and exploitable is Orrin Hatch's INDUCE (now IICA) bill[0]. I'm sure my prattling to Seth had nothing to do with this, but it is the perfect example of what I was talking about.

Note that in a twist rarely seen in the technical realm, sometimes the people writing the law are actually using the law as cover to enable some new attack. In that case it's even more important for outside reviewers to find and expose the backdoor in the law. Also, all laws should be written in my Leibnitzian Python wonder-language that contains no ambiguity.

[0] Leonard's Analogue to Leonard's Analog[sic] to Brooks' Law: "Renaming a bad law makes it worse."