Monday, February 05, 2007

words that mislead: protection

i've written about how there's no total, full, or complete protection before and i even touched on how the word protection on it's own was a little misleading, but now i think that that deserves to be more than just a footnote somewhere...

i think we're all intuitively aware of the implied boolean nature of the word protect and it's derivatives - you're either protected or you aren't... if you qualify it properly, then (and only then) the concept of partial protection gets acknowledged (ex. if you go into a sword fight with only part of a suit of armour, are you protected? no, not really... are you partially protected? sure)...

partial protection is all that anyone can ever offer, and usually partial protection is enough, so long as you're also aware of the fact that it's only partial and so have the opportunity to avoid situations where that protection might fall short... unfortunately security vendors rarely qualify their use of the word protect and it's derivatives (protection, protected, etc.) so ordinary folks get entirely the wrong message from the vendors and are lulled into a false sense of security, sometimes simply due to a sloppy choice of words (though as witnessed before, it's often a downright intellectually dishonest choice of words)...

so to help people make more accurate interpretations of the messages they get from vendors, whenever you see the word protect, protected, or protection, whether qualified or not, adjust it's qualification to mean partial protection and try and make yourself aware of the situations where that protection might fail...

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