Pensieri di un lunatico minore

CYA

Continuing our rants on idiotic ideas in the name of “security”, comes this article by Dennis Forbes:

The CYA Application Security Model is the practice of implementing so-called security obstructions primarily to absolve the vendor from blame if something goes awry during everyday operations. This model is usually sold under the pretense of improving user education, or encouraging safer application usage, but that’s of minimal actual concern (in reality the opposite outcome—more risky application usage—is probable).

Dennis goes on to discuss all the silliness that comes from this. The thing that I don’t think is emphasised enough in this writing though is the Chicken Little syndrome, which teaches users to ignore all the warnings because they’re stupid, and then they’re not actually paying attention when you need them to. This kind of thing also happens with warning labels in our lawsuit-obsessed world.