Bill Gates: At the crossroads

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Agreeing with the others

As a matter of fact, I was about to respond with a Mosler safe analogy, but found I had been pre-empted. Okay, so how about an athlete? Somebody trained in athletics over the years has a distinct advantage over the armchair quarterback who decides to try his hand at it.

As an aside, you do see arguments waged about the relative merits of open code (verified by so many eyes) vs closed (nobody can see your vulnerabilities). I regard this as virtually a religious argument - both sides have merit, but it would be hard to prove one way or the other.

But as for Unix -> Linux vs Windows, this one is pretty clear. Unix was created for networking computers and running multiple jobs (trivia - the name was a play on Multics). Networking grew from Unix, which grew from networking,... Long before the thought of malicious attacks, it was a known necessity to insolate users - keep user A from corrupting user B's data, keep user C's busted compile from destroying the entire system, and the like. *nix has security at its core. Never perfect, but that is what is in its blood.

By contrast, Windows grew up in a completely benign environment. On your desktop, completely controlled by one user and interacting with nothing. And the evidence suggests that the developers just connected existing code to make new capabilities, rather than working from a design, which takes more time. The company's protestations (under oath, in one instance) that it is unable to remove the browser or media player without damaging the operating system implies a definite disregard for sound design principles - a problem or vulnerability in one area can spill over into another, totally unrelated area.

When the web came along, the quick response was to graft communications on top of the existing product so as to get to market. Then as criminals began to demonstrate the capacity to disrupt and steal, the response has been to try to figure out the problem and patch. Sometimes patches break prior fixes, because (apparently) the product complexity has outgrown its manageability.

As I read from the press releases, Mr. Gates has committed to a rewrite for Longhorn to design security in, rather than hoping for the best. We'll see what fruit this labor bears. But bottom line, the current generation of Windows is inherently unsecurable.

Posted by: IT_User   Posted on: 11/20/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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