Comment by gerdesj

2 months ago

That's where the court's technical distinction between the words: "could" and "would", is important. It appears they have reduced the distinction to a risk assessment which is more objective than opining wildly!

For example: I've just re-wired a three gang light switch. I verified power on with my multimeter (test the meter), cut the power and then retested all the circuits to make sure I had got it right.

It turns out that switch three is on a separate ring main. Cool I didn't get to test my body's ability to take a whopper of a shock. In the UK it is common to have upstairs and downstairs rings for light circuits. Our kitchen has quite a few lights in it so it got a separate ring as well. Anyway there are quite a lot of wires in there because all of them are two way switches. Oh and I am allowed to work on them because of the switch location - not kitchen and not bathroom, ie a low risk location

I noted down the connections, and took them all out. I put Wagos over the flying ends to make them safe, turned the power back on and got on with the job in hand.

I then cut the power (both circuits) checked again with my Fluke. Oh bollocks ... enable power, test the Fluke and then cut power again and recheck the circuits.

Now I re-terminated all the connections. There was plenty of additional wire so I decided to cut and re-strip the conductors, to make sure that I avoided potential failures due to "work hardening" from the inevitable pushing and pulling and "gentle" forcing into position. Once all the conductors were screwed down I pulled on them fairly forcefully to make sure they wont fall out.

I screwed down the switch face plate and restored power. Its a brushed metal finish switch so I did test it was not live, because I'm careful. I tested the functionality ie all three switch circuits (three) from all the switches (six).

So, given that description is it possible that the connectors might fall out in the future and short on say, the metal back box. Of course it is possible. It could happen but would it happen?

You could postulate all sorts of scenarios. Perhaps I may be careful but I might be cack handed and forgetful and got something wrong anyway and a wire might still drop out. Now we are at the point of whataboutery! and that wont wash.

The would/could distinction is a powerful one and it is analogous to how we do risk assessments.

I'm certainly not saying you are wrong in your assessment but I think you are fiddling with details to conjure up a "could" and not a "would". I agree that knowing the schema would assist a hacking attempt but would it make a successful crack more likely - no I don't think so. It is a classic case of obscurity despite security but a rather more complicated one than putting the ssh daemon on port 2222.