Mary Ann Davidson Critiques Faulty Coding Standards at W3C Conference

Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer for database giant Oracle, remembers the first time she heard her company's marketing scheme that advertised its database products as "unbreakable." "I think my response was 'What idiot dreamed this up?," Davidson said Thursday at the W3C conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

If civil engineers built bridges in the same fashion in which software developers write code, people would face the "blue bridge of death" every morning going to work, Davidson said. Software developers, she noted, tend to laugh nervously when they hear the analogy -- an insider reference to what programmers call the blank, "blue screen of death" on a PC display when Windows fails.

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