Bruce Schneier, You're my hero
Posted: Fri, 8 September 2006 | permalink | No comments
The article of interest, Microsoft and FairUse4WM, starts with this:
If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.
And just gets better from there, covering the economic realities of software patches for vendors and the user community, and makes (yet another) call for taking some of those externalities that dodgy software vendors love to exploit and internalising them again.
Possibly the best sentence in the whole article, and a fantastic soundbite, is this one:
[Microsoft] is not a public charity, and if the internet suffers, or if computers are compromised en masse, the economic impact on Microsoft is still minimal.
The unasked question is, of course, how we can make the economic impact of enabling abuse of the Internet through shoddy security practices a little larger? Making Linux a more compelling option for all consumers is a nice long term one, but lawsuits and legislation would make them take notice a bit quicker.
The funniest (or saddest, depending on your perspective) part of the DRM patch is that Microsoft released the patch out of it's normal "Patch Tuesday" cycle (which is guaranteed to garner more-than-usual interest), and then an updated version of the DRM-smasher is released a few days later getting around the "fix".
I highly recommend everyone to read this article. It's a nice piece, full of talking points and thoughts to ponder.
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