Why the NRA hates smart guns
Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press.<p>This is how I&#x27;ve felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated into computing:<p>Imagine that someone in California hacked into a power station and caused a blackout. Police responded and found the hacker and their equipment. Shortly thereafter an &quot;anti-hacking&quot; bill appeared in the state legislature to prevent a repeat of such a disaster. The attacker used some strange system called Ubuntu which most computer users have little or no reason to have, so that was specifically outlawed in the state (while any other Linux distro is fine). They had a quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and a USB 2.0 keyboard for &quot;faster hacking&quot;; the bill mandated a limit of 9 gigs, 2 cores, and PS&#x2F;2 connectors only. The attacker also used something called the &quot;TCP protocol&quot; (misnomer intended); the bill also mandated that the protocol include a 4th and 5th step transmitting &quot;I am not a hacker&quot; and acknowledging &quot;You will be prosecuted with a felony under California SB1137 for improper use of this TCP protocol&quot;.<p>The bill passes and no more hacks occur. Other states don&#x27;t want to be seen as soft on crime, so they draft copycat bills and randomly ban openSUSE, Gentoo, and trackballs with more than 6 buttons. Within a few years computer enthusiast sites pop up detailing which states are safe to travel to with your laptop. 1 gig RAM chips get unexpectedly expensive as everyone wants to get up to that 9 gig limit in restricted states. California legislators visit university computer labs disapprovingly and talk about closing the &quot;Linux loophole&quot;. Activist groups lobby Congress, maintaining that the Founding Fathers never could have conceived of computers as an evolution of the printing press and therefore the 1st Amendment did not apply to electronic devices or communications. Programmers everywhere grumble about coding for two different communication protocols depending on whether or not your users are in California (but it&#x27;s such a big market you can&#x27;t ignore it). Your mother wonders why you can&#x27;t just get your work done on an 8 year old laptop running Windows 7, it&#x27;s good enough for her web browsing!<p>The contractor maintaining the power plant control system again leaves the web admin panel open and unsecured after testing from home and forgetting to unflip a poorly labeled feature flag on the production server.