Comment by marginalx
1 day ago
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.
Read the scope I discussed. Physical records can be made exceptionally secure. They can be secure on location (archival location, with guards). They also aren't reachable by every human being on the planet who wants to infiltrate.
Think about it. To destroy the public archives, of which there is typically more than one, you must travel to said location, breach it with weapons and other means, and destroy it. Or, you can sit in your parent's basement in your pajama's, and hack and destroy.
There is not even remotely the same risk profile.
And if you think something is "good" because 'the world thinks it is good', then I have to ask you why you're validating something via popularity. You know what else was popular? Fossil fuels. Smoking. Using uranium in makeup for women. Something being accepted, and being fun or convenient, doesn't make it correct, sensible, or right.
So please describe the horrible and incredible "gigantic convenience". Because I lived before the internet, and now after, and yes it is convenient.
But it certainly isn't a 'gigantic' one, nor is it sensible compared to the insane attack surface and risk.