We are being held to ransom. Not only by virus writers and sloppy coders, but by the big corporations like Microsoft and Symantec.
It isn't too hard to write a secure operating system. Unfortunately, MS insist on making each OS bigger and better and contain more functionality. The problem is that the bigger and more functional you make something, the greater chance there is for 'holes' to appear. Instead of bolting on ever more bloat, MS should be making the OS smaller, tighter and more secure. Integral parts of the OS today are yesterday's applications. We all want our systems to play multimedia files or access the internet, don't we? The answer to that is NO!!! If you want a workstation to run Office and nothing more, why use Microsoft XP (or even 2000 or 98 for that matter!!). If the only app you have installed is MS Office (and this is true for many, many workstations in companies all over the world), then why do you NEED anything more than the functionality provided by Windows95 or NT4?
Windows Media Player is well and good, if you want to play mediafiles, but almost every week, a new 'fix' comes out from MS for a security hole in Media Player. If you don't need media, why bother.
Everyone demands bigger, better and faster processors, and more and more memory and hard disk space. Why? To get some performance back after we have installed a bloaty, inefficient OS, top heavy apps AND have to run a virus scanner in the background, plus a handful of other 'security' apps.
Ad Aware6 is great. So is Asquared, so it Pest Patrol or Spybot...but often one program will spot something that the others don't pick up....so we have to run all three or four, IN ADDITION to trying to actually get any real 'work' done. This is putting our time to ransom. No longer can we be expected to do a 9-5 and get 7 hours 'productivity' out of our systems...a good half an hour a day can be wasted through performing scans and checks on our systems. Of course in an office environment with networked computers, one dose of 'virtual fungus' can take out an entire network, yet we allow users to operate computers with operating systems which ALLOW them to catch these trojans and malware.
Policies and rights are no answer. Why buy a ?50,000 sports car and then weld up the doors, take six pistons away and disable the radio. Why not just get a ?5000 runabout and 'access all areas'.
Hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on the XP box in a friends office reveals 23 running processes and 17% of the processor time and 30% of the memory dedicated to antivirus and malware scanning. All he uses the machine for is word processing.....nothing else!!! Not even internet.
So why does he NEED XP Professional, plus 6 other apps running before he can even type a letter? The OS itself is hogging a fair chunk of his memory and processing power, not to mention the security programs.
It's not just sloppy coding and bloatware vendors though...user culture plays a part. We are taking away newer OS's and giving everyone Windows 95 in areas where a computer is provided for data entry or word processing only. We are networking them of course, but only allowing file and print sharing over NetBEUI, with no TCP/IP protocol installed. If the users complain that they are not able to look at email or browse web-sites, then we shall politely explain that they have no need to do that for their assigned tasks, and that any surfing or email should only be done on machines where users require that functionality for their daily job. If other users wish to access email, they can do it in their lunch hour on a 'supervised' machine, or do it at home in their own time.
This may sound draconian....it is intended to be. Our company data and security has a higher priority than providing fringe benefits for employees.
Perhaps when MS finally give us a compact, secure OS, where we can add on functions as separate apps rather than integrated into the OS (one hole in security affects the whole OS), then we will relax the rules.
Of course, this will never happen!! In the meantime, our employees and the company will consider our freedom, our time and our money 'held to ransom'.
