Re: Personal Firewall Day?

[Christopher Hicks <chicks () chicks net>]

On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
> Linux can't do it because it's contrary to its proponent's mind-sets.

I'm a Linux proponent and it's not contrary to my mind set!

> Maybe Sony can do it through their Playstation sales unit.

The less Sony is in your IT the happier you will be.

> Basically, the answer is to kill off general-purpose computing for 99.9%
> of the desktops in the world.

That's what the Linux Terminal Server Project and other similar efforts
are trying to accomplish.  But when I've offered to do such things for a
few churches and schools, and even give the folks whatever missing
hardware, they still cling fondly to their Microsoft desktops.  It's going
to take those people "passing away" before this technology is going to be
able to penetrate.

> I think Schneier and Geer et al were wrong when they wrote their little
> paper about Microsoft monoculture being dangerous - they adopted a
> disease model and, like most analogies, they let the analogy steer their
> thinking.

Whining about monocultures is a lot easier than thinking about immune
systems in a broader sense or living things in a broader sense.  One place
their analogy breaks down is in failing to recognize that the "desktop"
and other technological niches are niches that may be best fit by one
species.  This sort of thing happens in the real world all the time.  In
those cases the species has to learn to defend itself against various
things including diseases.

> What we need is a monoculture but we need to recognize that we're
> building one and make sure it has a good immune system that can spread
> and share immunity as fast (ideally faster!) than new cyberpathogens can
> spread.  But that's a topic for another day. ;)

Moving to a "grid computing" world with dumb desktop nodes would make me a
very happy camper.  It would also decimate 80% of help desk jobs.  But
complaining about linux guys not being interested in making such a thing
is missing the point.  We're not lacking the underlying technology to make
these things happen.  We're lacking the application set to make it so
utterly compelling that people want to jump on.  Evolution is great, but
it's a GUI and doesn't work without it.  That would run across our
ultimate system, but we need to get people on the system with their
current machine before they move all the way in.  To do that we need web
interfaces for all of these things.  And that's going to take people
relaxing about the underlying OS which seems quite adequate now and spend
some time focusing on those boring pesky applications.

-- 
</chris>

No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
-Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)

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