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Re:The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root ... by comboy on Saturday August 13, 2022 @05:35AM (#32448250)
It's a standard sequence for years now. Docker, rails, ring.. most popular things. Make it work anyhow, optimizing for best user experience, do all the bad things along. It gains popularity, some reasonable people join in making insides better. Then because of popularity it gets some scrutiny and some security holes are getting fixed. Of course, only those which could negatively impact its image.

Sometimes you end up with something quite decent, sometimes there's no one with enough power in the company who can rebuild it properly and it's just trying to make a stone out of sh.t.

If you are trying to do it properly from the start you are in a lost position. You need way more time, more money and better people to end up with something that looks the same for an average user (in most cases, for a few products it may pay off). You iterate more slowly, and you can be copied before you acquired enough user base.

I hate it. Marketing wins over merit everywhere currently.

Re:The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root ... by shuntress on Saturday August 13, 2022 @10:13AM (#32450078)
You are discounting the "merit" of simply existing.

Bad software that solves my problem now is almost always going to beat great software that might eventually solve my problem.

Re:The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root ... by comboy on Saturday August 13, 2022 @01:33PM (#32451978)
Many people choose worse reward rather now than better reward later. It's rational in many contexts. The problem is that we are unable to jump out of these local minima.

Just as in coding, when you have a problem and you're stuck, you look for a solution. But it's very hard to learn that there's some better solution to a problem that you've already solved.

Re:The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root ... by int_19h on Saturday August 13, 2022 @07:31PM (#32454771)
That depends on whether said bad software solves your problem now by creating even more problems in the future. For example, through lax security.