[Klug-general] Re: Bill Gates the Stupid Image - not Bill Gates the Stupid Person

[Stephen Ryan]

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:53:14 +0000
From: Margot <margot at lawrence1961.f9.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [Klug-general] Re: Bill Gates the Stupid Image - not Bill
	Gate	the	Stupid Person
To: Kent Linux User Group - General Topics <kent at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Message-ID: <478D0F2A.3080009 at lawrence1961.f9.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Stuart Buckland wrote:
>> Perhaps you might post something much more important than the question
>> of
>> why after 30 years the PC software industry is a great deal less secure
>> than
>> it was when it began.
>>
> 
> If that is indeed a fact, and I'm not saying it is or is not, there are
many
> contributing factors.  Arguably those having the greatest impact being
> non-technical in nature.
> 
> What makes you say software is less secure now than 30 years ago and what
> makes you think anybody was even thinking about security 30 years ago?
> 
> Stu
> 

If you read what he actually wrote, you'll see that he said that the 
*software industry* is less secure, not the *software*.

--Stephen said
George/Stu/Margot, I am stating the obvious really. 30 years ago there was
no internet, very few LANS, WANS, VLANS etc and confidential data was
limited in terms of how much of it was maintained by computers. Companies
might have had a mainframe and a few PC's came along in the early 80's which
may have been hooked up for terminal emulation. Very few people knew how to
hack into these systems and there wasn't much of interest to see inside them
anyway. With the exception of a few choice targets. 

There was no training courses for engineers or manuals, and few tech
supports lines - so you just stumbled around trying to fix things and
generally hacked your way through. Many of us came from electronics
backgrounds, so you could get right down in the hardware.

Later on in the mid - late 80's the likes of Bill Gates came along with a
grand vision to make computers more user friendly. His argument was that if
you change the aesthetic quality of the interface - then the devices would
be more user friendly. The counter argument to this was that user
friendliness should be more about making devices more secure - than just
making them look prettier. Anyway, the world decided to trade prettiness off
against security and we ended up in a world where human beings could
interact much better with the technology - but effectively became much more
ignorant about it - given the layers of abstraction required to support the
GUI.

Today, we have the most confidential data sitting in insecure databases all
around the planet. Whilst it looks much more prettier now - it is
nevertheless held together by millions of lines of code that very few people
would ever take ownership of. How could they?

I believe that people like Bill Gates knows this and that he knows that he
and others have effectively built a roller coaster which will be very
difficult to get off of.

Enough said in this forum guys... but anyone can talk to me at
sryan at intrench.com

cheers

Stephen Ryan	
www.intrench.com