>I feel bad responding to your comment with essentially a one-liner, so even though it's late,

ah, the strategic advantage of timezones :P

> Okay, but you are massively underestimating the cost.(... )here you go: "certifying your product as consumer or industry grade would need to be an efficient process and would probably add onto the cost of developing a product" does not at all capture how thoroughly screwed a new startup will be if they have to devote $60k to a pentest before even getting off the ground. That would have sunk Apple, for example. I don't think most people recognize or appreciate how brittle startups are at the very beginning.

1. Apple grew up in a different world.

2. For consumer wares we are talking about an inspection, not a pentest whether or not they conform to basic security (SSL, update mechanism in place, salting and strongly hashing passwords). A lot of people (including me) learned this stuff from lurking on the internet. It could even be a self audit, making you financially liable if you cannot document your security if something breaks (we hereby certify that the product fullfills the following basic standards: strong hash and salt => using NaCl etc).

3. I have been involved in enough startups now that I know how fragile they are. And bluntly put: so what. Society makes rules, businesses conform. If it is properly enforced, it just becomes another thing everybody has to do, not a competitive disadvantage (long term even an advantage if your economy runs on secure devices)

>You're also assuming that there are two states: "secure" and "not secure." You're further assuming that there is a way to transition from one to the other, by "becoming secure" through some state-mandated process. But it just ain't so. No matter how much money you throw at it, you can only increase security, you cannot prevent security problems. If you've shipped code, you've probably introduced some security problems. We should still try to improve the situation, but it is nearly impossible to make software secure. And in the meantime, it's the perfect tool for competitors to stamp out competition, since only incumbents can afford to be labeled as "secure" (when they're not).

No. I am assuming there is "obviously insecure", "not obviously broken" and a spectrum of "secure" which depends on your threat model. For the latter I agree with you, it cannot be defined. But you CAN define a bottom and bitch slap anyone into bankruptcy who thinks they can screw with that.

>I don't think it would significantly curb the power of DDoS attacks, both because DDoS attacks are an inherent problem with the web's design and because hackers are always finding new and innovative ways to increase their DDoS power anyway. Some IoT devices aren't going to make a huge dent in their abilities in that regard.

I disagree with that, simply because there will be LOTS more devices in IoT than we have now. Bruce Schneier also agrees with me https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/10/security_econ...

> What would help is if pentesting became a regular occurrence due to massive cost reduction. It shouldn't take $60k for a pentest, but it does. The way to achieve this is through open-market competition. Regulation will only raise the price.

Moot because I specified earlier we are not talking about full pentesting. But even if not, first force EVERYONE to get it, drive up the prices, then people will start learning it and drive done the prices heavily and start to automate. Look at web developers. Once prized, now a dime a dozen (compared to before). Pentesting is no different from anything else, it can be tiered, the lower tiers more and more automated and pressed into frameworks.

> Regarding your first point, I could take the easy route and say nothing. It's tragic when anyone dies. But it's also a fact of life. Many people will die to self-driving cars, yet there will be many thousands fewer deaths thanks to them. The idea that a single human life is more valuable than raising the standard of living for everybody is as strange to me as it is to you that a single life isn't the most valuable thing.

We are not only talking about some persons dying vs higher quality of life. We are talking about millions of people possibly being vulnerable to extortion, data theft, degradation of services through DDOS etc. ON TOP of poeple dying vs slightly slower rollout of higher quality of live.

> Obviously, my perspective would probably change if someone close to me died due to some fool's bad software. But in that circumstance, the justice system would be as available to me as it is to you, and it was designed for just such an occurrence. It would not offset the heartbreak I'd feel, but at least society has processes in place to do something.

Can't comment

>this is me seeing the implied "but we can deal with it worse if startups fail"
>
> This seems self-evident: Many of the enjoyments we take for granted are thanks to startups. Our quality of life has dramatically improved due to the technology they help usher in. Technological progress is not nearly as inevitable as everyone would like to believe, and it's easy to forget how much better our lives are thanks to it.

This is one of the biggest myths...startups are good at developing products. Established companies, Universities and Institutes are good at developing new technology and driving science forward.

The latter is non obvious, fragile and in decline. The former is driven by making money, and is a lot more self deterministic.

"From scratch" Startups have given us (if we simplify a lot) PCs, Amazon 1.0, numerous SaaS,etc. all making previously very cumbersome and clutchy tech viable for the market. Which is a huge risk, tremendous work and deserves all the money they make.

But the PC was done before at Xerox, amazon could only start doing research after it had become the retail giant it is now and Intel, Google and almost all other highly innovative Companies had their roots in academia, being either spin offs or PhDs applying their knowledge into business. Silicon valley exist mainly because of the US military (not only but especially because of DARPA), not just because of some "self made businessmen" taking risks (they made huge contributions I don't want to disparage, but "great person" history is strong in our cycles). And some of the largest contributions to our way of life had nothing to do with business at all (Tim Werners Lee, Linus Torvalds and above all Richard Stallman don't get nearly enough recognition IMO. Especially RMS created a whole new world of value creation by popularizing the idea of software freedom and making sure generations could learn freely). Startups don't contribute to this nearly as much as they like to claim.

Heck, even Peter Thiel is moaning about startups not really tackling high tech issues any more. SpaceX and Tesla are some of the rare shining innovative lights, but a lot of the value that startups provide comes from applying existent tech to old processes (Salesforce, netflix, uber, airbnb, zenefits...). IoT will probably be in the second category, not the first.

So if they are only going to modernize existing processes with new tech, lets take the time to force them to do it right from the beginning