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“Single points of failure are all over, and those affected could have engineered with failover if it really is critical for them to keep working,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat. “If anything AWS is too reliable, it's reliable enough that people don’t bother doing the engineering for when it fails, so when it does fail it is a shock.”

“If you can tell a smart contract to ‘give me all your money’ and it does, is it even theft?” the computer scientist Nicholas Weaver of the University of California, Berkeley wrote about the theft. Unlike old-school agreements, Weaver wrote, ambiguities with smart contracts cannot be resolved in the courts and automated deals are irreversible — so developers must resort to begging when things go awry.

Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat that Apple's new Messages feature "seems like a VERY good idea." "Overall Apple's approach seems well thought through to be effective while maximizing privacy," he added.

“Consumers don’t really have the tools to be able to protect themselves,” said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute. “Once the data leaves the device, there’s no way of knowing what’s actually going to happen to it, what other third parties will receive it. … There’s no knowledge of how the data will be used by anyone.”