I always see whenever security flaws are found in operating systems, games, software etc., a patch is released within a few days.
How is it possible that every security issue seems to be solvable once the issue is pointed out?
This doesn’t seem to be the case in, for example, the medical field where you may not have a solution to every medical problem even though you understand the problem quite well.
In: Technology
The people who build these systems have more or less a full understanding of how every component of the system works. Everything that happens in the system is also usually deterministic, i.e., one thing predictably causes another thing. The human body is also much MUCH more complicated than 99% of computer systems and just much more complicated than the other 1%. These facts mean we can reliably 1. find issues 2. understand the issue and 3. find a solution without TOO much trouble. We have a lot more data at our fingertips and can usually test the solution thoroughly beforehand, given that the system isn’t a living thing.
Humans built and programmed computer systems, whereas we did not build the human body. If we had the ability to just rewrite behaviour/default functioning in the human brain we’d likely achieve the same in the medical field.
Some computer problems aren’t necessarily patched, but disabled. For example, flaws in Intel processors over the last few years have led to minor and in specific use cases, noticeable performance decreases because whatever feature causing the security issue had to be disabled.
Humans didn’t invent biology, so there are things we understand without being able to control. Humans invented software, we have 100% control of it. There are a very, very large number of bugs in most programs, but most of them are believed to be harmless. When a bug is shown not to be harmless, that puts it on the “to fix” list. Fixing the rest of the bugs would be too expensive, so they remain.
computers are explicitly dictated systems. meaning it only does what a human tells it to do. humans coded every single instruction that all computers everywhere execute.
the reason we can’t solve every medical issue is that we don’t see and control every action every cell does. we treat issues that affect thousands and millions of cells. not individual cells
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