Comment by b112
1 day ago
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change.
It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.
Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.
So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.
There are many examples of important paper records (property, birth/death, etc) being lost in fires or floods, so it's not the case that "everything worked perfectly fine" in those days either.
All those examples are not different from not having backups of digital data too. Making copies when you microfiche, having duplicate stores, it's all exceptionally easy and a solved problem.
And of course everything didn't work perfectly, it did however work "perfectly fine", which means "very well" or "good enough". Meanwhile, adding in network connectivity to anything vital these days is just insanely dumb.
No software is secure, and will never ever be secure. Ever. Anyone who thinks that software can be made secure, is 100% wrong, period. My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages.
Your overall assessment of advantages and disadvantages seems like you're comparing paper with backups to software without backups, though. No competent system can have all the records destroyed remotely. And we know how to backup digital systems even better than we know how to backup paper ones.
And as a third option we can have efficient digital systems that aren't plugged into the Internet. (Presumably the Internet could have a copy that's regularly updated.)
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I was ready to argue until I got to the end "My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages."
Suddenly your entire argument shifted in my head and I fully agree.
Might be something there I can learn about myself then :D
I agree that digitalization is not a panacea, but things did not work anywhere close to perfectly fine when everything was on paper. There are just as many ways for analog/physical processes to go wrong.
A sophisticated genius hacker in a different country can’t touch your paper records, but an absolute moron with a bic lighter can destroy records just as effectively. Hell, an irresponsible clerk can do an incredible amount of damage just by misfiling things.
Duplication literally doubles costs in the physical world, and has the downside of being very hard to keep in sync. A bank keeping paper ledgers would be absolutely fucked if they had to switch to a backup ledger that was more than a few hours old.
On net, I believe that digitalized documents are a net improvement.
Yeah, while online copies are a risk, you can make offline digital copies of important data for a thousandth the price of paper copies.
Put some desktop-size tape robots in several government building closets, and task someone with switching tapes weekly, and you can achieve more reliability than multiple huge paper archives.
Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.
The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.
My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.
Everything comes with a risk, and people usually take it with a decent understanding of how to mitigate it mostly.
If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.
Technology can make lives safer. However, software is never secure, cannot be made secure, this is empirically proven to be a 100% valid position.
In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all.
And my point is, it's not worth the convenience.
But physical records also cannot be made secure. And the convenience is gigantic. I think that it is worth it, as clearly does much of the world.
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