Cybersecurity: What You Need to Know About Computer and Cyber Security, Social Engineering, The Internet of Things + An Essential Guide to Ethical Hacking for Beginners by Lester Evans

Author:Lester Evans [Evans, Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4 – Engineer’s mind

Engineers are a funny breed in that they have a fairly cold, calculating and clinical approach to solving problems. For an engineer, presentation doesn’t matter; an ugly solution is still a solution and might even be the optimal one because no time was spent puffing it. When employed by a company to produce something like software, a tractor or a smartphone, an engineer will look at material constraints, budget, deadline and project parameters to find whatever fits all of those. The implication of this approach is that the product made by an engineer will necessarily have severe flaws because it’s impossible to account for every possible event unless the budget is infinite, which it never is.

In the case of the Ford Pinto, the problem was that the fuel tank was situated right behind the rear bumper with an axle and its studs between the two. Any impact to the rear bumper could rupture the gas tank and cause a fire. A high-speed collision would also deform the front doors as a result of the force, making escape impossible. When three teenage girls riding in a Ford Pinto died in a fiery rear-end collision in 1978, the Ford company was charged with murder and recalled 1.5 million vehicles[94], even though their safety was statistically no better or worse than for other cars on the market. Compare this to Volvo, which has made nearly indestructible cars[95] that tear through other vehicles like wet cardboard but isn’t getting nearly the kind of recognition its safety deserves.

The general public has an emotionally charged way of looking at things, as they showed by blaming Ford for the death of three young girls. If you adopt that same attitude, you will get hurt without accomplishing anything and even thinking like an engineer might not yield results. James Damore wrote his memo from a standpoint of an engineer and got fired regardless. Gab founders thought like engineers in making an alternative to Twitter and still got besmirched. You can’t win by throwing a temper tantrum or by simply butting heads on an engineering level, but you can employ some sneaky ethical hacking, which could be as simple as ditching Chrome and adopting another browser that is more suitable to your newfound needs. That’s it--you’re not changing the world, but your world.

So, the company employing the engineer looks at the same product from both a marketing and business standpoint. Does the product make the world a better place and does it make the company any money. Bad publicity hurts the company just as much as the product not selling at all, but it’s nearly impossible to just generate goodwill. So companies generally go for the most risk-averse strategy that won’t cause lawsuits and bad press, regardless of if the product is actually defective.

An ideal customer for the company would be one that’s too dependent to ever leave and just rich enough to be a worthwhile target but not rich enough to fight back legally.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.