Text 5577, 57 rader
Skriven 2005-07-02 11:55:46 av John Beckett (1:379/45)
   Kommentar till text 5574 av Rich (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's
===========================================
From: John Beckett <FirstnameSurname@compuserve.com.omit>

"Rich" <@> wrote in message news:<42c636b8@w3.nls.net>:
> The problem with users exercising bad judgement is that you won't find
> a simple fix to software because the software isn't broken.  You also have
> a problem because you want to stop users from doing something they
> believe they want to do and which is virtually indistinguishable from the
> user downloading something like opera or acrobat reader.

Yes - these are good points. I have some vague misgivings with the reasoning,
but I agree that the above is a valid point of view.

One misgiving: If what you say is true, how come there is no BIG warning on the
Windows CD? Is Windows a friendly world or not? Is a naive user looked after or
not? I would argue that everything in Windows and its associated applications
like Office is designed to make the user feel happy and in-control. There just
is NOT sufficient distinction between what Windows CAN control. and what it
cannot.

Another misgiving: If what you say is true, how come Microsoft released code
that it should have known would result in thousands of infected zombie
computers?

I guess I'm just irritated that all the Security Initiatives from Microsoft are
great stuff, but they just coincidentally happen to more-or-less force users to
upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. I know they can't really bolt all the new stuff onto
NT4 etc, but it leaves a sour taste that the completely-faultless
wonder-programmers from Microsoft make solutions that will be effective only
when everyone upgrades.

Another misgiving: I think it is somewhat rewriting history to make out that
the security issues of the last couple of years have been an unavoidable
consequence of risk-taking users. The fact is that Microsoft did set out to
attach the Internet to Windows. Internet Explorer became an essential component
of the operating system. I haven't got around to figuring out exactly what is
going on, but it appears that IE (or its zones?) is somehow involved even when
I access a share on my local subnet. Also, ActiveX components were intended to
Enhance my Experience.

Well it turns out that the clever folks who came up with all this stuff
overlooked a few facts of life that are pretty obvious in retrospect, mainly
that the Internet is NOT like my friendly computer.

On behalf of the clueless users, I will accept 20% of the blame for the
spambots, and 20% can be assigned to unavoidable bugs, but the other 60% is due
to stupid design decisions in Windows (-or- the 60% blame is due to connecting
Windows to the Internet when it was not ready to be so connected).

> I do want to follow up on another of your claims when you refer to
> "similar to the hundred other warnings that occur in a day".

Well, I might have been exaggerating. Sometimes it feels like a hundred.

John

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