Stupid
In “where the red fern grows” is described a trap for catching a raccoon (without a hunting dog) so you can harvest the fur to train your dog so that you can hunt raccoons “fairly.”
What you do is you climb up a tree and you bore a hole down partway into a branch. Then, you place a shiny metal disc into the hole, just small enough to fit. Then, you drive a nail into the branch, but angle it so the pointy end protrudes into the hole.
The upshot is that the raccoon can reach into the hole, and he can grab the metal, but he won’t be able to pull it out past the nail. He can drop the metal and pull out his paw and escape if he needs, but he can never pull out the metal: he can only touch it, and grab it, but can never have it.
In the book raccoons are dumb enough that they won’t let go of the metal, and you can blast them in between the eyes before they give up the sparkly treasure.
I feel that data security specialists have never yet been smart enough to figure out a way to use a similar technique to reliably secure precious databases.
There’s raging dumb out there, for some reason.
(I’ll even spell it out, if anybody cares. You put your data into a “hole” that has only one public way to access it, which is through the opening, and you can see that all the data is in there, but there’s a nail blocking the opening and you can never get the whole data set out at once. The exact way this is done is a supremely trivial exercise which probably involves a completely isolated server and a single pipe out by just one query protocol that is accessible by one single device. I’ll even describe my own personal security measure, my entire household is serviced by the absolute cheapest, slowest connection commercially available, which is 5 Mbit download, 0.5 Mbit upload. You’d have to continuously saturate my upload bandwidth for several years before you can steal all my data. Security specialists: are you seriously so stupid, you cannot figure out this trivial issue?)