I don't see how this is "think of the children"? The point is that we need to be cognizant of how the things we build can be (ab)used.

It’s this thinking about how things can be abused that is behind calls to ban encryption or for ISPs to be filtered, or for Torrents to be banned.

Every powerful tool can be abused. In fact, the more powerful it is, the more it can be abused. The abuse of the tool is the responsibility of the person abusing it.

We don’t require baseball bat or hammer manufacturers to think about how their product can be abused, even though baseball bats and hammers have been used to murder people before.

> It’s this thinking about how things can be abused that is behind calls to ban encryption or for ISPs to be filtered, or for Torrents to be banned.

You skipped the slippery slope and went straight to the scariest outcome. That isn't healthy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

You said "many times you need legal or social solutions", but now you're dismissing legal and social solutions.

Most people on here will agree that banning encryption is going too far. But it's ridiculous to use the worst-case solution as a pretext to avoid even thinking about the problem.

Maybe they're just saying that "think of the possible uses" needs to be applied to itself -- "think of the possible uses of claiming to think of the possible uses."

> Most people on here will agree that banning encryption is going too far.

Are we talking about the same people, many among us here, who don't have any problem manipulating content to fit their view and banning Free Speech ? It's a tad of an hypocrite argument...

You are placing an almost legal liability on engineer to ensure the tool is gonna be only used to fit their definition of "good" which is a problem in itself.

Gun makers are not responsible for mass shootings. The ill-intended shooters are the only one responsible for their actions.

You're saying it's a problem to ask engineers to make sure their tools will only be used for their definition of "good". But you also imply that tools should uphold "Free Speech", which is exactly that — fitting someone's definition of "good". So which is it?

Is someone saying tools shouldn’t be made? It’s good for engineers to think about how tools they make could be abused to mitigate damage.

In a case like this, the developer could have added some periodic notification to the device or require the device user to rotate a code or reauth with the service periodically to limit abuse.

Can you think of a modification like that you could implement on a baseball bat? Of course not. Is merely a straw man.

I'm not so sure I like where the rest of this argument is going, but I do want to support the idea that there are probably a zillion ways to spy on and otherwise abuse somebody if you can get them to use an iphone that you jailbroke and installed some off-app-store software on.

Maybe it's better to come up with some lesser way to discourage people from using this kind of software on somebody else's phone without their knowledge than shutting down the whole service entirely.