Re: Windows Genuine Advantage -- Indeed?

James A. Donald:
The only secure environments are very modern
operating systems. Nothing was written to face the
challenges of a fully connected world.

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
Is that a significantly bigger challenge than remotely
connected users, which *were* planned for in Multics
and such? If so, why and how?

In the old days, the machine was connected to a small
trusted community, for example the students on a
university campus, and the amount of software and
programs on the machine was much smaller than it is
today. Today, computers are connected to the world,
Nigeria included, and run a huge amount of software from
very diverse sources. There are simply a lot more
programs running on a given machine, and bigger
programs, with more capabilities, resulting in the
crisis of composition.

As a result of the crisis of composition, we now have
malign programs, trojans and spyware, and benign
programs that process malign data - for example web
browsers visit pages, some of which are designed to
exploit flaws in the web browser, in order to take
control of the viewers computer. These problems did not
exist in the old days, not because web browsers were
better or operating systems were better, but because
there was no such thing as a web browser - no back then
one would be using a tool to process hostile data
generated by someone in Nigeria or one of the fragments
of the former Soviet Union, because it just was not
possible.

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