Information Security News: Re: Hackers are common criminals

[chris () RITC CO UK]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, William Knowles wrote:

> Stop blaming Microsoft - it's the hackers who are the guilty ones.
Oh yes, one more point.

Microsoft isn't being blamed by anybody for the actions of "hackers"
(crackers). They are being blamed, rightfully, for the poor quality of
their software which suffers from so many of these bugs, far more than any
other platform. If a lock company makes faulty locks so that you can enter
a house just by turning the handle, it's difficult to argue that a burglar
"broke into" the house, since no effort was required to do so.

Fred Brooks, in "The Mythical Man-Month", argues that improving the
quality of software (e.g. by peer reviewing the code)
proportionally reduces the number of bugs, security and otherwise. If
Microsoft actually cared about their customers and not their profit
margins, then they would spend some of the 90% profit they make on their
applications on actually improving the quality, and the rest of the world
wouldn't be burdened with such a bug-ridden "de facto" software standard.

Just my $0.02.

Ciao, Chris.
   ___ __     _
 / __// / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <chris () ritc co uk> | Phone: 01223 503 190 |
/ (_ / ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Unix Systems & Network Engineer | RITC (Cambridge) Ltd |
\ _//_/_/_//_/___/ +-- Perl/C/Web/Java Programming --+ Cambridge CB3 0DG UK |

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