Daily Archives: November 12, 2006

Hostages to fortune

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Jim Allchin, Microsoft VP, quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley, talking about Vista.

In my opinion, it is the most secure system that’s available, and it’s certainly the most secure system that we’ve shipped. So I feel very confident that customers are far better off by using Windows Vista than they are with anything that we’ve released before.”

Earlier, he had said that he was so confident in the operating system’s security measures that he believes there’s no need for Vista users to run any third-party antivirus software.

Stay tuned.

LATER… Bill Thompson has written an insightful column about this. Excerpt:

Vista will ship with Kernel Patch Protection – also called PatchGuard – which checks to see if the core has been altered in any way. This should make it a lot harder for viruses, trojans, rootkits and other types of malicious software, or malware, to install.

PatchGuard will be backed up by support for the Trusted Platform Module, a hardware component built into many new computers that gives the operating system a way to store and use secured information.

The new approach should make life more difficult for malware writers, but it is also going to get in the way of legitimate security software vendors such as Symantec, which has already pointed out that its anti-virus programs rely on being able to modify the Windows kernel, something which will no longer be allowed.

Microsoft’s response is to argue that “kernel patching”, as the process is called, is not needed and that the standard security tools are all that are required.

It may be right, but it’s hard to tell because we don’t actually know much about what is going on inside the Vista kernel. Microsoft, like many other commercial software developers, prefers to keep such details secret.

“If severe flaws are discovered in Vista”, Bill concludes, “and there already signs that the lockdown is far from perfect, then users may well wonder why they have put their faith in the ‘benign dictator’ approach to security.”

The Great Revulsion

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In the run-up to the mid-term elections I was puzzled by why UK media outlets were regularly consulting an odious, right-wing fanatic called Grover Norquist.

Just reading Paul Krugman’s reaction to the electoral results makes me even more puzzled. He mentions our friend Norquist:

I’m not calling for or predicting the end of conservatism. There always have been and always will be conservatives on the American political scene. And that’s as it should be: a diversity of views is part of what makes democracy vital.

But we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.

Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don’t accept the legitimacy of opposition. Democrats will only become acceptable, declared Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, once they “are comfortable in their minority status.” He added, “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

Norquist is famous for his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” According to his Wikipedia entry, “his close business and political ties to recently indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff are the subject of a current federal investigation.”

Welcome to Googlewood

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Interesting — if inconclusive piece by Richard Siklos about whether Google is a friend or a foe for traditional media companies.

Is Google a media company? The last time I checked, a media company was generally defined as a business that accumulates audiences and sells access to them to marketers.

And Mr. Schmidt said recently: “Ultimately, our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information. That’s part of our mission.” And if it is a media company, it is the world’s biggest, with a market capitalization of $144 billion.

But when I spoke to David Eun, Google’s vice president for content partnerships, he took umbrage with the media designation. He noted that Google did not create or own content — in his mind, part of the definition of a media company. Rather, he said, Google is a technology company: “I would say we’re a conduit connecting our users with content and advertisers.”

The point may be semantic, but it reminded me of the longstanding friction between cable companies and TV broadcasters over whether cable should pay for distributing the free over-the-air signals — or whether cable was doing the broadcasters a favor by putting their signals onto the system through which most people watch television.

Again, Mr. Eun disagreed, noting that Google is not a distributor: it tries to push people to other Web sites and takes immense geek pride in how quickly it does so.

Indeed, a search for “Google” and “friend or foe” took me 0.10 seconds and elicited 271,000 results. It took Mr. Eun not much longer to try to explain to me that Google (a) respects copyrights, (b) gives any content owner a choice of opting in or out of its search results and (c) focuses on ways to help its media partners achieve their goals. “I say firmly: we are friend because we are trying to build your business objectives,” Mr. Eun said.

The future’s already here

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The Observer has an edited version of my rant to the Society of Editors Conference in Glasgow…

In any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears – still – from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers. And what one finds, on closer examination, is that the industry seems determined either to insult or to ignore them…