Re: Windows Genuine Advantage -- Indeed?
- From: constantinopoli@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 6 Jul 2006 03:09:21 -0700
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
<jamesd@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In the old days, the machine was connected to a small trusted
community, for example the students on a university campus,
When was this? I'm thinking of the golden age of the dialup modem.
Anyone who had a telephone, a terminal, a 300 bps modem, and too much
time on his hands could attempt to break into any machine with dialup
access. Of which there have been a fair number for a long time.
Remember CompuServe? It dates to 1969.
Also, there was the ARPAnet. It, too, dates to 1969. And had open
dialups called TIPs or TACs. Dial into one of those, in, say, 1979,
and you could try to access any of *hundreds* of machines.
... 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.
Nope, only hostile data generated by someone more local. In the
'70s my phone bill consisted of a punched card. I wondered what
would happen if I repunched it with different data on it, say an
end-of-deck marker. No doubt some people tried it.
I have repeatedly heard that the Macintosh is relatively free of
viruses and trojans, and I have also repeatedly heard that the reason
it is free is that it isn't popular enough.
Well, it seems to me that whatever the exposure and popularity these
big computers had in the seventies, a typical Internet-connected Mac
has several orders of magnitude more exposure and popularity.
My dad works in a computer department at a business school, has since
the start of the eighties, same department. At a certain point in, I
think it was the late nineties (the years are blurring together) his
job changed, not in title but in focus - the change was a reaction to
what was happening to the computers. His job for years had been to help
people and maybe occasionally, very occasionally, deal with some
intrusion problem. But now the intrusion thing is a major part of his
work, sometimes dominating his attention for weeks at a time. Something
happened at some point, and intrusion and security became a major
issue, where it had not been a major issue before.
Going by my experience, things change even though both the before and
the after have computers with a lot of exposure. Maybe it's the order
of magnitude of exposure, or maybe it's the culture, or maybe it's
something else, but computers in the seventies weren't automatically
exposed to the same security situation as computers today merely
because any joe could reach them by modem. The situation is palpably
different between Macs and PCs and palpably changed in the nineties
even though both sides of the change had a large absolute degree of
exposure.
.
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