Suppose:….. a committee of Biblical scholars huddled over their laptops, heartbeats increasing with increased agitation….or, genetic researchers of just about any trait…..

Stock (…gasp!) market models……

…remember the Archimedes Palimpsest?

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Yes. See Mark Minasi’s The Software Conspiracy. It’s not a screed – it’s a survey and set of interviews with leading software companies.

‘We’re never going to see the end of these “fixes” are we?’

Yes. But only if the mindset changes and only if the underlying OS is not such an easy open target. No browser code is ever perfect but flaws don’t have to lead to eminent destruction.

Third generation exploits? Perhaps. But IT online is still in puberty.

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Safari 4.0.5: on Mac OS X at any rate it’s turned into a RAM sucker, using up to 1 GB VM when accessing wave.google.com. And why do they archive and hide the previous version on disk when their code has no facility for restoring it?

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No. We have a decade of experience which argues that no large software system will be completely fixed before it is replaced by something new that needs new fixing. If the patch approach was working, things would be getting better, but In fact malware is demonstrably worse, both in quantity and power.

Microsoft continues to escape blame for the malware problem, which seems odd since about 93 percent of browsing occurs under Windows. Yes, Microsoft puts a lot of effort into patching user systems, but things are getting worse nevertheless. The current approach has failed, and, yes, there are alternatives:

* Microsoft could develop tools to certify a Windows installation as clean for use in on-line banking.

* Microsoft could develop a fast Windows re-install to over-write and clean up any infection.

* Microsoft could supply a new “live” CD on-line banking operating system (OS).

* Microsoft could support hardware system re-design to prevent infection.

Most Individuals and small businesses seem either uninterested or scared to take action to secure their systems. It is possible right now to run a free OS which stops most current malware. Loading from CD or DVD automatically avoids existing Windows infections. A laptop can even run without a hard drive, which then cannot be exposed or infected, while still working in reasonable comfort.

For online browsing I use Puppy Linux loaded from DVD, and describe it in:
http://www.ciphersbyritter.com/COMPSEC/PCBANSQA.HTM
After the Puppy DVD is set up, most user time is spent in Firefox, not Linux. My non-technical wife uses and likes it for banking, email and Facebook.

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Sisyphus,

Software is amazingly difficult to write “cleanly” and you can’t absolutely prove that it’s bug-free (at least for anything beyond the simplest code).

From my earliest coding days with Fortran on punch cards, the simplest bugs were ferociously difficult to fix, due to nothing other than the font that the code was presented in! It’s easier now since fonts are better, but try this on for size:

the capital letter for the character between N and P – “O” and the digit that represents a number smaller than 1 – “0″.

Here, it’s relatively clear they are different characters, but imagine a poorly designed font produced by a crappy dot matrix printer where you literally could not tell them apart!

This is an almost trivial example, but scale it up to a program (or Operating System) with millions of lines of code, and there will be bugs, no ifs, ands or buts. Significant effort and better tools can definitely reduce the numbers and severity, but it is literally impossible to completely eliminate bugs.

Well-loved. Like or Dislike: 4  0