Edwards' law

Edwards' Law is an adage stating that "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem."

Recent Example of Edwards' Law

There are many examples of this law in practice throughout recent history and the modern world. A good example of this would highly experienced and knowledgeable programmers and hobbyist software engineers who write malicious code such as worms, viruses, trojans, etc, to gain acceptance into organizations typically called cracking teams or blackhat communities. Two notable of these are Team Fairlight and Team Paradox (not to be confused with Team Paradox Robotics), which are both software cracking teams. To gain acceptance in blackhat communities, they must gain notoriety or display a great level of skill, which occurs in a myriad of ways. Examples of this would be defacement of popular web pages, attaining a certain number of "zombies" or bots (computers that have been compromised and are under the control of the attacker), cracking of an algorithm such as those used for CD-Keys in commercial software products, news coverage of a malicious program circulating around the internet, the list goes on and on.

This is one example of a great problem that society tries to fight back with almost entirely technology. Most computer users are familiar with the growing numbers of commercial firewalls, anti-virus/anti-spyware products on the market such as Symantec's Norton Antivirus and Webroot's Spysweeper. These would be, for the most part, unnecessary if it were not for the blackhat community and users with malicious intent. If people were taught that this kind of behavior or illegal display of their talents was wrong, they would be less inclined to do it.