I was reading a nice post from Gunnar Peterson about APTs. His making the point that everybody is excited about this "oh huge threat oh oh" stuff from the Google x China incident but in fact we should be worried about properly engineering the systems we depend on. I like his analogy of blaming the big bad wolf instead of the house of straws.But you know what? I think that my current depressed state has changed my way of thinking about security (or changing my way of thinking about security is making me depressed...). I agree with him that the source of the problems is bad security from the deep of the systems we rely on Today, bad (or no) security design in general. But I just think this is a problem we cannot solve. We can see the same issue on several other disciplines, old design and decisions being perpetuated in a way that causes issues to current stuff. However, revolutionary approaches are not (or are almost never) possible due to the way that economy and society works. The technology evolution is also so fast that it would require too many revolutionary processes to solve the recurrent problem of old decisions based on premises no longer valid causing problems to the current state. We simply cannot afford burning everything to ground and start fresh again. All these things are competing for resources and it would be naive to believe we could just choose to build everything with the perfect design.Gunnar uses the example of the