[ColinDabritz]

Jail time for bugs that should have been preventible and caused harm to users. Mistakes and bugs happen, but we also have methods of mitigating them. Standards, quality controls, tests, analysis, and other care. I specifically said jail time for gross negligence because that means not taking care and allowing harm to users.

If you had an error that leaked private information, it's worth an investigation. If it made it through despite controls, that's understandable. If they find you failed to do analysis on the risk to users privacy, if you failed to have controls in place, if you didn't code review or test the code, then you have made specific choices that harmed users. That should be criminal.

We need to take software engineering seriously as a discipline. We have the potential to do more wide scale aggregate harm than any structural engineering collapse. We need to start acting like it.

[UncleMeat]

What is "should have been preventable"? Mandatory continuous fuzzing of all apis? Interprocedural static analysis to detect all of the owasp top ten? Manual audits of all dependencies and transitive dependencies on every update? Hire world class auditors to manually inspect code?

I'm a huge security person. It's my job. But its unbelievably difficult to secure programs even if there are clear steps in hindsight that could have prevented a bug.

[AlexandrB]

> What is "should have been preventable"? Mandatory continuous fuzzing of all apis? Interprocedural static analysis to detect all of the owasp top ten? ...

All of the above, possibly. Other engineering disciplines seem to have defined what constitutes due diligence just fine. This isn’t a novel problem.

It’s obviously not possible to make anything perfectly safe or perfectly secure. But it’s certainly possible to define a minimum amount of effort that must be put towards these goals in the form of best practices, required oversight, and paper trails.

Edit: Even “fuzzy” disciplines like law have standards for what constitutes malpractice or negligence when representing a client.