Thursday, November 25, 2010

Internet Quarantine: Where IT Differs From Healthcare

As Bruce Schneier goes on the subject of quarantining potential threats away from regular users of the Internet, I think it's interesting to point a big difference between IT diseases and human diseases: we have the code. We have the specifications for the computer.
For closed source, the software maker has the code, which means that diseases or weaknesses can be fixed with more efficiency than any human condition.
For opensource, it's even better: everyone has the code, which means that everyone can look for a solution to a problem.

That's not to say that every Internet user is a qualified-IT-physician, it's just to underline that comparing IT and healthcare may not be so promising. Compared to medicine, IT professionals can fix a problem in no time and no money. Although there are problems of copyright in IT, it's nothing compared to those in pharmaceutical industry. The whole plan of the human body and interactions is still to draw. And we can spoil many computers, hours of computing, lines of code, reboots, for research without an ethical problem.

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