Microsoft: 'Trusted Windows' still coming, trust us

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Past Court Decisions.....and negative impact

How much of the current security crisis came to pass because Microsoft was pressured into revealing more proprietary code than they otherwise would have? T.P. Jackson should have recused himself in favor of a more technically literate judge. Nowhere else in American business history can you find an instance of a company being prosecuted for giving away a product. Especially, a product that owes its origins to public funding (Mosaic).
If the legal system is not sophisticated enough to deal with the problem of inadverdant monopoly; then a modification of that system is warranted BEFORE an attempt is made to address the issue. The publicity surrounding that case encouraged too many people with criminal intent to absorb every bit of the newly available information on the inner workings of Microsoft products. In addition, Microsoft is going to have to do something about the amount of critical information that it makes available through MSDN and Technet. The assumption that all developers and integrators are honest cannot be afforded.
Unix and TCP/IP based systems have been hard to secure since their inception. It's unfortunate that the explosive growth of the Internet has forced even Microsoft to adopt a protocol set with known vulnerabilities. Microsoft's implementation is vulnerable because it's uniform and consistent over millions of systems. Linux/Unix, in comparison, allow individualized implementation of security policies on a per machine or per network basis; and the user base is smaller. If Red Hat or Suisse were forced to support tens of millions of users and a few thousand software and hardware developers, they would become as vulnerable as Microsoft in extremely short order.
The hardware based security solution is THE solution. Our defense, telephonic, and financial systems already have proven that. The problem lies in finding an economically non-disruptive means of implementing it. The Microsoft of old could have forced the issue in much the same manner that they forced the rewrite of graphics and ergonomic standards!

Posted by: thomgood   Posted on: 04/25/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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