Crypto is really, really easy to screw up. If you screw it up in production software, the consequences can be anything from "fifteen million people get their credit cards stolen" to "a teenager in Saudi Arabia gets beheaded for treason".
People have every right to learn about and experiment with crypto, but it's just too important to treat as a plaything. If you're marketing your software as "cryptographically secure", you're asking users to place their trust in you to keep their secrets safe. That's a tremendous responsibility and we should treat it with the utmost seriousness. People who should know better keep shipping software with utterly broken DIY crypto, so we need to keep hammering home the message that you should never, ever roll your own crypto in production software.
If someone asked questions on StackOverflow about how to perform brain surgery with kitchen implements, we might want to indulge their curiosity, but we have a moral obligation to say definitely don't do this, because performing brain surgery in your kitchen is an outstandingly terrible idea and someone will probably die. Right now, the software industry is suffering from an epidemic of kitchen brain surgery and it urgently needs to stop.
People have every right to learn about and experiment with crypto, but it's just too important to treat as a plaything. If you're marketing your software as "cryptographically secure", you're asking users to place their trust in you to keep their secrets safe. That's a tremendous responsibility and we should treat it with the utmost seriousness. People who should know better keep shipping software with utterly broken DIY crypto, so we need to keep hammering home the message that you should never, ever roll your own crypto in production software.
If someone asked questions on StackOverflow about how to perform brain surgery with kitchen implements, we might want to indulge their curiosity, but we have a moral obligation to say definitely don't do this, because performing brain surgery in your kitchen is an outstandingly terrible idea and someone will probably die. Right now, the software industry is suffering from an epidemic of kitchen brain surgery and it urgently needs to stop.