Risks to the Public

Abstract
Edited by PGN (Risks Forum Moderator, with contribu- tions by others as indicated. Opinions are individual rather than organizational, with usual disclaimers implied. We ad- dress problems relating to software, hardware, people, and other circumstances relevant to computer systems. Ref- erences (R i j) to the online Risks Forum denote RISKS vol i number j. Cited RISKS items generally identify contributors and sources, together with URLs. Official RISKS archives are available at www.risks.org, with nice html formatting and search engine courtesy of Lindsay Mar- shall at Newcastle:; http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/i.j.html (also ftp://www.sri.com/risks). CACM Inside Risks: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/insiderisks.html Mini-editorial (PGN) This is now my 45th year with involvement in SEN. When can I quit? Sadly, the risks continue to be pervasive, and avoiding them is highly relevant to what principled software/system engineering should entail. We need ap- proaches to systems that consider trustworthiness as a col- lection of -ilities all of which can be critical, and which in many cases are intricately related; they cannot be solved in isolation. Trustworthiness requires reliablity, security, and much more especially when human safety is in- volved. And every system is likely to have critical aws that can be exploited or triggered accidentally. My Octo- ber 2020 CACM Inside Risks column, A Holistic View of Fu- ture Risks (http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/cacm250.pdf) attempts to illustrate some of that. If you have not seen it, I would welcome some feedback.