Micro Soft Security

Security must be designed into an operating system from the ground up for it to be fully secure. That is the basis of the Microsoft Trusted Computer Platform, earlier known as Palladium.

This platform essentially means that computer instructions are verified as okay before they are carried out through a series of cunning methods of hiding what these instruction say.

By noticing that anyone can listen in to a cable and monitor anyone else's internet traffic, Unix bred users have no security expectations of their operating system, if they want to hide it or check it, the tools are just there and you can hook them up when you need to do so. But privileges to do things like wipe out hard disk file systems should have better guards than allowing an RPC (Remote Program Control) to simply answer "Are you sure?" with one click of a mouse.

The point of years of harmless worm attacks is not lost on Microsoft. That their operating system was one designed for single user high powered workstations goes back to the genesis of Microsoft as an innovative computer language developer.

The great lumbering beast has been coralled, but its bite back may be to evolve into a state of invulnerability and network hostility that is what the internet was designed to carry.

A better car analogy that Steve Balmer's recent vehicular strain may be to say that Microsoft's essential implemention has been to develop a racing car engine, mount it to a high speed cornering chassis, a body with high speed wind dynamics made of light brittle plastic without bumper bars.

Linux is not perfect but it has a heart that takes care of the central security issue. If you want to wipe the hard disk, you can, but it also can be backed up and running on any number of backup installations and that process made effectively into an automatic one. If you want to encrypt your data before dumping it into a database, its all there. High quality stuff.

As Microsoft takes advantage of the security opportunity it will be selling yet another version of Windows that may be broken by hackers. We hope they get it right and the internet becomes a safer place to work.

Links:
The Register

The Register

The Reason for Copyrights

When a giant like Microsoft uses someone else's technology (which was an early goal of Object Orientation, the ability to introduce new code into an existing system environment).

Imagine Old Blue Bill himself at a meeting with his Microsmurfs...."use their technology! That is what it is there for, no, you are not copying anything, you are distributing their programs for free on your installation CD and by the time they wake up we will own them anyway..."

It may be the other way around. By appropriating technology that did not belong to them, the IE browser evolved. Eolas is thus entitled to payments of $520 million for patent infringement.

That this has a powerful sense of "the way it should be" is due to the filing of a patent for the software method. Inventing a technique for introducing plug ins in the Windows environment is a bit of a technical miracle since the product itself, due entirely to Microsoft on line updates, I bellieve, now does not crash the laptop or make it run hot. I still can not use IE as its is nowhere near as good as the Open Source Mozilla.

Open Source is an intellectual sharing of technology. Microsoft takes the corporate board room take over route. A bit of Justice and now we can look forward to more great technology from Eolas and if Microsoft will not pay them their due, we can forsee a future IE update that introduces a raft of new bugs.

The SCO Linux Copyright case may see a precedent in this case, however, as it is retroactive and about a product that took the market by being given away.

The difference, boardroom boys, is that Eolas developed and patented the technology and Microsoft used it without permission for massive commercial gain.

SCO bought the AT&T Unix copyrights (and even that is disputed by Novell) and then announced it will charge the userbase before legally establishing any authorship to Linux. And IBM slapped them back with probably more problemative* patent counter suits.

To endanger the Open Source movement is stupid. Linux source is public domain.

The difference is the evolving result. SCO will be too busy worrying about IBM for the next five years to develop decent code. IBM will support the Open Source community and win.

Let not the Open Source movement suffer. It is our great public library of object oriented functionality, like CPAN, like Athens, and we Open Source Developers need the GPL to survive. It is our constitution, our founding document.

SCO's lawsuit could cause damage to the Open Source community so is a Class Action against SCO predictable?

New words

* problemative - adj: continually occuring source of conflict or difficulty. Whereas a problematic problem tends to be one that gets fixed, a problemative problem goes on and on for far too long and that is what is wrong with it.

SCO used to be the Santa Cruz Organization and they produced SCO Xenix (which they licenced to Microsoft and IBM, I think) and later replaced it with SCO Unix. It was a working copy of an AT&T system. I used both in the mid 80s. Later, as Caldera, SCO managed to distrubute a version of Linux, called Caldera Linux, later withdrawn. We wish SCO luck, being old buddies and all. It is like watching and old not very admired friend going to war.

Microsoft: Asia not playing fair over OS | CNET News.com

The Measure of Domination

An entity seeking to totally dominate its environment as core Microsoft vulnerablities that, in my very humble opinion may be due to the environment and culture Microsoft created itself being suddenly subsumed by the Internet. They had the hearts and minds of 90% of PC users, and we want to stay with our dear friend Windows. We run Windows ME on one of our laptops and Microsoft's fiendishly clever update agents not only probably know the name of my cat, but also the colour of my eyes and that now another backdoor is closed.

Competition in the Operating Environment does not require free software but SCO is unfortunate in that it may get squashed by the mere size of the action they take against IBM.

It is not due to the Unix code that Linux was copied otherwise SCO Unix would have made it, otherwise BEOS would have made it.

The industry of course wants to respect and love Microsoft for their grand service to humanity and allow them to reinvent the wheel, properly. But others should still be allowed to design their own cars. It would be polite of Microsoft to abstain from World Domination plans anytime right now.

At the same time, we should politely stop anyone from owning more than 20% of the world wide market of desktop computers or internet terminals, or they will inevitably become dinosaurs. To exclude Microsoft is silly. To partially replace them in desktop deployments is strategically essential and the powers that be are increasingly seeing this. Microsoft needs to feel comfortable with viable competition. Heck its just an operating system and its not that difficult to write one.

The SCO gambit's scale reveals that a larger company is behind the IBM 3 Billion dollar suit. Microsoft is an unnaturual benefactor of the FUD the case creates. That it is such a massive battle will see it going on for years before huge court hearings is the only injustice.

A wise justice could immediately rule in SCO's favour and allow IBM to pay $1 per licence as what IBM is marketing is substantially not based on SCO's copyright and I know this from 20 years experience with AT&T Unix, SCO Unix, Microsoft Xenix, IRIX, CTIX and Linux. Linux is the only one that runs Apache so therefore is unique in the ubiquitous world of file servers that it has proliferated. When it takes the desktop, the lawyers and suits perceive it will be Big Time cashola. Like the Internet was supposed to be. SCO have at the very least hung in there and provided a history for Unix. They could for example run a Unix museum in Sillicon Valley as a service to mankind.

It could thankfully be over in a few seconds as the Judges gavel falls, and proclaims the obvious. SCO should win $0.50 per corporate licence sold by IBM since they withdrew from the Linux collective development laboratory; and then be made to pay all the original writers due royalties that SCO naturally owes. SCO did not have a contract with them to claw at earnings based on their input into the IP. That was a contract with the original owners. If SCO can make a copyright claim when it was not the commissioner of the work, then it follows that SCO has to pay the original authors a royalty.

Just an opinion. But it is a solution that makes this kind of thing less of a threat.

vnunet.com Users set to ignore SCO's Linux threat

Intellectual Property

There is a storm brewing. Linux is essentially being accused of being Unix and Windows is threatened in the far East by Government intervention. Operating Systems are in trouble and at war.

A better Operating System came along called Beos. It featured the best features of most others, was sleek, fast and handles IO better than Linux, Mac or Windows and it was nearly free. It was certainly propriety, and had an instant mechanically sound feel as though it was not about to fail and turn to smoke.

But it did. There is "vapourware": vapour is droplets in suspension that seem to vanish as they cool; but smoke is the result of something having been destroyed. As we suspect Beos was destroyed as a commercial proposition despite its appropriateness to all sorts of applications.

It was destroyed by the dominance of a giant that firmly gripped its markets making foothold finding very expensive.

Operating systems are big things, and entirely necessary if you hope to find use for your new laptop.

It is understand which one is good for what, that is what it is.

Selling IP as a commodity is fine, but it must be done with the same understanding that car manufacturering is. It is the combination of good code, good market sense and opportunity and evolution that makes a good operating system.

Copyright can not be simply held in the scripts that are used to run the OS. It makes no sense that machine instructions should be restricted. But it does make sense that in an open source environment we can evolve a better Linux and it can have no reliance on any other code from any other vendor and run every Linux application. SCO would lose as the Linux community does not need the code they say is copied.

Japan could go to Linux and then SCO, if my some remote chance it gets its claws into IBM successfully, could sue Japan for billions and billions of yen.

This scenario could be so different. If 3 or 5 operating systems had equal market share and opportunity than Microsoft sure would be one of them. But its very success in a wired world becomes its eventual downfall if shortcomings in remedies from capabilities clearly provided by them is turned against customers by viruses. Viruses are just programs, nothing more. They only do things that Windows can do. Linux is just as vulnerable but does have better protection.

Having more beasts out there evolving is a better scenario that everything using Windows, or Linux or even BEOS.