What an extremely, needlessly elaborate way of saying "security vs. convenience is a tradeoff." Indeed it is, and that's not a particularly novel insight.
"security vs. convenience is a tradeoff" is an extremely glib and meaningless aphorism that is instinctively innate to almost every living organism.
The statement obliterates the nuance of which tradeoffs need to be made and the cost and impact of those tradeoffs from an economic and social perspective that are foundational to being able to reason about risk.
I wouldn't put it that way, but I would agree with anyone saying that statement omits a lot of information. Sure, it does, and it's pretty much the most general and abstract possible way of saying that. My beef with the article is that, despite its truly gargantuan word count, it hasn't added any new information on top of that statement. Once you know the thesis of the article is "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero because security is a tradeoff and you want users to have convenience," everything in the article is pretty predictable.
I would have liked to see, say, some nuts-and-bolts discussion od fraud handling in some particular industry -- that would be novel and interesting to me.
