Re: EU Court Rejected Microsoft's AntiTrust Appeal
- From: anw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dr A. N. Walker)
- Date: 19 Sep 2007 17:25:36 GMT
In article <1190140637.760215.130730@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mel Rowing <mel.rowing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But is this alleged insecurity inherrent
Historically, it's inherent. Most OS's, as developed by
industry/academe, were, by original design, intended to enable
computers to do interesting things while preventing the users from
doing interesting things to other users, and quite often, as a side
effect, preventing them from harming themselves as well. Hobbyist
OS's, of which Windows is the principal survivor, were designed to
allow users to do whatever they liked as conveniently as possible.
Security and convenience are not actually opposites, but there is
a strong anti-correlation. When we started connecting our computers
to the wide, wide world, the "convenient" machines were simply wide
open to attack in a way that the "secure" machines weren't.
If you build a hotel, you naturally put locks on all the
bedroom doors, and you don't [normally] allow the guests to go to
the kitchens and do the cooking. Thus, you insulate the guests
from each other, and ensure that the food is prepared to your hotel
standards. If you have an open-plan house and decide to convert it
into a hotel, then you not only have to add locks to the doors, you
first have to install the doors, which may not be easy, and you lose
the convenience to yourself of being able to wander freely from room
to room. That's pretty much what happened to Windows -- to become
secure, it needed extra doors and locks, and the owners lose some
of the convenience that attracted them in the first place. It's not
impossible to do the conversion, but you started with the wrong sort
of house. Windows has been playing "catch up" with other OS's over
the decades as a consequence.
or is it that the OS by
virtue of being the interface that serves 90+% of all the systems on
the planet
Whoa! 90% of the home PC market perhaps, but it's not 90%
of the *serious* computers on the planet, nor is it 90% of the
*computers* on the planet [most of which are in our cars, washing
machines, doorknobs, keyboards, TVs, ...].
in itself attracts the attention of hackers?
To some extent, but it's a bit of a naff victory, like
taking toffees from children.
Could it not
be (I don't know) that the alleged improved security features of the
alternative systems
"Improved" is not really the right word there. Whatever
security there is in Unix systems, for example, has pretty much
been there for 30 years. The improvements have been bug fixes,
and a handful of genuine enhancements. This is different from
the improved security of Windows, which has had to be added from
essentially zero.
is not so much a function of the quality of their
design as much as the fact that their use is so limited so as to not
be worth the hacker's efforts?
Um. In what way is it "worth the hacker's efforts" to
hack into Granny's PC and plant rude messages in her letters?
If you were a serious hacker, as opposed to the vandals who just
like kicking at open doors, would you not be aiming at defence
computers, banking computers, Google, telcos, research depts,
web hubs, eBay, ...? Well, some of those people have been hacked,
but mostly they are [now!] pretty well protected. And I suspect
that you'll find rather less than 90% Windows usage there.
[...]
My admittedly limited experience of programming suggests to me that
the more elaborate the program design, the more complex the tasks it
has to execute then the greater the number of logical operations that
will need to be incorporated.
That is [roughly] why "elaborate" program design and "complex"
tasks are Not Good. But lean, mean design is difficult to sell, esp
when it is being given away free. Perversely, people prefer to pay
more for a worse product ....
--
Andy Walker, School of MathSci., Univ. of Nott'm, UK.
anw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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