On: Clang vs. Clang

[jeanlucas]

> he's a perfectionist, and he merely expects perfection from the rest of us as well.

Nicely put, but at the end perfectionism is a flaw.

[himinlomax → jeanlucas]

Not when computer security is concerned.

[klyrs → himinlomax]

In all things, moderation. Security must be evaluated as a collection of tradeoffs -- privacy, usability, efficiency, etc. must be considered.

For example, you might suspect that the NSA has a better sieve than the public, and conclude that your RSA key needs to be a full terabyte*. We know that this isn't perfect, of course, but going much beyond that key length will prevent your recipient from decrypting the message in their lifetime.

* runtime estimates were not performed to arrive at this large and largely irrelevant number

[saagarjha → himinlomax]

Security is a tradeoff. Perfect security is not using a computer.

[jeanlucas → saagarjha]

Security is a constant tradeoff, and trading off time for perfectionism is not a good one to take.