According to this story
Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect its Windows operating system, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware surreptitiously takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread more malware to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of the onslaught.
As more business and social life has moved onto the Web, criminals thriving on an underground economy of credit card thefts, bank fraud and other scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year, according to a conservative estimate by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A Russian company that sells fake antivirus software that actually takes over a computer pays its illicit distributors as much as $5 million a year.
With vast resources from stolen credit card and other financial information, the cyberattackers are handily winning a technology arms race.
Old news, you say? Sure. But what is happening now is exactly what our little band of Microsoft critics (who included Ralph Nader, who organized an important conference on the subject in 1997 which probably is responsible for my mistaken decision to vote for him in 2000). This helped pave the way for the Clinton administration's antitrust suit in which Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson (a Reagan appointee, by the way) ruled the company an illegal monopoly.
At the time many computer geeks, under the unfortunate sway of techno-libertarian utopianism scoffed at the DoJ's suit, which was settled in 2001, shortly after the Bush Administration took over, which many saw as a sellout. But even with the sellout, Microsoft had been defanged to some extent, and a more diverse computing environment was able to flourish.
The basic problem behind the situation described by the Times is that Microsoft's Windows operating system was designed for non-networked personal computers of the eighties, and many of the company's initiatives were geared at "ease of use" to the exclusion of any other consideration. One particularly egregious example was Microsoft's attempt in the mid-nineties to take control of the "stodgy" Internet by "activating" it with the kinds of more interactive doo-dads that they had put into Windows. Unfortunately for them and the rest of us, these doohickies were totally inappropriate in the networked world that was emerging, which made Windows into the ideal virus growth medium.
Other systems such as Unix, (and Apple's, which is now also Unix based) were designed for a networked world and were built with security at their heart. Security did not have to be bolted on later as Microsoft has been kept very busy doing for years. Although the Times article repeats the distortion that it is only the lack of popularity that has kept viruses at bay on Apple's unix-based platform or Linux systems, that is not entirely true. These systems never added the "ease-of-use over security" gadgets that made them easy targets for the bad guys. While these systems aren't foolproof, they are several orders of magnitude harder for the bad guys to crack. Basically, nothing gets installed without the user knowing about it.
Which brings me back to the salad days of the late nineties, when we used to decry the "Microsoft Tax" - the fact that you had to pay for Windows on a PC even if you didn't intend to use it, even if you intended to wipe the drive clean and place another OS there. None of the major computer manufacturers would sell you a PC without Windows, so you subsidized Windows whether you wanted to or not.
(Yes, I know there are counter-arguments that none of this cheap hardware would be available without the mass appeal of Windows, and that's true. As well as the argument that I've heard from many not-for-profits that they need the ease of use that Microsoft's products provided. And there was truth to that, as well - although it's becoming less and less of an issue).
That has changed now. My wife's computer crashed and burned this week, either because of malware or hardware failure. I am inclined to suspect the latter in this case, even though malware - and the increasingly intrusive antivirus system required to keep it at bay - was driving her crazy BEFORE the crash.
And so I just replaced it with a new Dell system with Linux preinstalled for $400. Over the past ten years I've been using and closely following Linux, and for most of that time, I've been saying that the systems weren't quite ready for the non-geek user. It seemed like an asymptotic curve where the systems got ever closer to what Windows offered the non-geek without ever quite getting there. It is only this year that I've become convinced Linux is in fact good enough now. For what she does, read email, make calendars, write the occasional word-processing doc, the tools now part of Linux are good enough, and not significantly harder to use anymore. But the tipping point for us was the virus issue.
The recession has put many once-ubiquitous products into serious question. Five dollar lattes from Starbuck's, bottled water and now, I would argue, Microsoft Windows, are luxuries we can no longer afford. Countries such as Brazil, China, and many in Europe have learned to the cut the cord and use a cheaper, less monopolized system. It's cheaper, and now the malware crisis tips the scales further against Microsoft. |
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