The benefit is that medicine is effective and measurably safe. It’s obviously necessary, and the supplement industry shows why.

They do push life-explodingly addictive and harmful painkillers on their patients, despite knowing the harm it does, because regulations don't prevent them from doing that.

What would be the consequences of an FDA for IoT? Huge price increases, sudden workability of patents as a means of protection, but more security and better products?

And who would have had some of the most input into said extensive regulation?

If drugs started exploding testicles you can bet customers would start demanding they didn't (male customers at least). Just look at the Thalidomide incident, I've seen it in the news within the last decade and it happened nearly 60 years ago at this point.

The market has spoken, cheap wins over secure time after time. The consumers know, and they don't care, because to them the stakes are just not that high. Their genitals will be fine, and who wouldn't mind an extra set of eyes on the front yard.

This idea that people understand the total consequence of what they do with their money is so simplistic that it's stupid. Markets don't "speak" from a vaccuum, they demand what their constituents are convinced is valuable, regardless of the accuracy of valuation. Lies sell garbage all the time and the consumer isn't to blame for wanting it, the professional, skilled, psychology-wielding liars who sold them on it are.

Hypothetical example: pay for a bunk study that concludes eating apples prevents hair loss, benefit for decades, with negligible repercussions to your business when the lie is uncovered. I'd be skeptical if you claim you can't identify several real examples yourself.

I really dont care if my tea kettle is part of some botnet. I cant even imagine a reason why I should care. I guess it sorta sucks for the people getting ddosed :/

For instance, my router cost me $20. It is probably full of security holes. I dont care. To buy a router that was secure I would have to pay more than $20. I would not feel any benefit for spending that extra money. So I don't do it.

On the other hand, as a developer I'm always thinking about security because it is fun and I feel a sense of responsibility for the things I make.

So consumers would of course be happy if you made plastic straws - look at how many get sold!

Now if you told people they would not have plastics, and everything would cost 5x more because we dont have a cheap packaging option, OR tell people that they couldnt transport liquids anymore because we dont have bottles - well you can imagine those customers and consumers would be upset.

The economy is not moral.

Morality is laws and regulations which impose restrictions on the system to make it

fair Environmentally friendly less exploitive etc.

We try and let the market resolve as much of this on its own, so that we can have market efficiency without tying it up with regulations.

You can't honestly believe it's both okay to mislead people in commerce and okay to put the onus of good judgement on them.

Personally I think the consumer should face financial liability when iot devices are used in massive attacks that create problems for others.

Just because you chose a shitty vendor with a shitty product doesn't mean the entire internet should suffer.

I am a fan of things like brickerbot and I hope that sort of thing continues aggressively.

Sure good products can have a security flaw. But iot and home routers are complete garbage. The consumer should be held liable for being apart of massive disruption of the internet.

It's the equivalent of manslaughter, you might not have intended it. But in this case you didn't do anything to stop it and helped to cause millions in damage. I quite frankly don't care about their education. That's their responsibility. Just the same as you need to learn to drive.

They would do this because of information asymmetry and the collective action problem. At the point of purchase, consumers don't have the information to make a choice, and they don't have the ability to will an alternative into existence so they can choose it. Improvement in collective outcomes is often hard to achieve purely through market means, which is why we don't rely on markets to solve all these problems.

The reason they dont is because there are regulations and trials which have to be passed before you can go forward.

And those are things which people on HN regularly criticize - pointing out that life saving drugs would be on the market faster if these regulations were not so "onerous".

When a drug causes problems, customers often end up suing the manufacturer/developer of said drug. If doctors prescribe said drugs after it becomes common knowledge that it could cause a problem, they also might be sued for malpractice.

Are people sing IoT companies for poor security practices? If so, are they winning? Without that, what inventive is there for those companies to do anything more than they already are? It's not like there's actually any level of brand awareness for the vast majority of these devices, so it's easy enough to just ignore complaints and rely on the fact that nobody pays attention to your track record when it comes to this market.

i think the drive to reduce every bit of human behavior to economic incentives backed by a government force structure is ultimately counterproductive. would you agree?

If there were millions of dollars to be made in the flaming dog shit Segway getaway business, I am positive many would succumb to the temptation.

So your comparison is unfair, it's easy for you to avoid such a behavior because you have no benefits. Not securing a device is a significant economic win for the manufacturer, as explained by the thread originator. You get a device that "just works" as opposed to one with complex key setup instructions that by necessity must default in the misconfigured state (else, you bet everybody is using the defaults).

> there are three classes of humans 1) those who will throw the rock at you with the mob 2) those who will not throw the rock and avert their eyes 3) those who will speak out against throwing the rocks

> the ratio is probably 90:9:1

We don’t typically go around continually throwing actual rocks at each other, so it is possible to make progress on these issues.

The author of the tweet quoted was speaking metaphorically based on his own experience. Virtually no one supported him publicly when he needed it.