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Are friends electric?

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 16:59

Jon Honeyball puts his spellcheck to good use, reveals one of the nastiest examples of malware seen so far, and tries to remain upbeat about the future.

However, here's a thought. Skip forward a few years - Microsoft will by then have its Azure Cloud-computing engine in place, Office 14 will be shipping with a fully web-based interface as a delivery option. A home user might just buy a thin-client box that boots up and connects to the Cloud over their home ADSL connection: all their data is held in the Cloud and all application delivery is done there, too. It will have to be robust, and data will have to be secure and always available, otherwise nothing will work. Yes, it will rely on your home network connection, but given that you were most likely going to send some emails, do some e-shopping and look for holiday destinations, does this really matter? You couldn't do any of that without a working internet network connection anyway. For SMEs, the faster we can get to such pre-packaged, run-on-demand solutions the better: their IT managers will sleep better at night, that's for sure. And if this represents a return to the mainframe computer with a dumb terminal, then so be it.

I wish I could be more upbeat about the future for the home desktop, and the relatively unmanaged business desktop, too, but it's a nasty world out there. It doesn't matter who's to blame for this - Microsoft for allowing nasty things to happen inside its OS, virus writers for writing nasty things to access peoples' bank accounts, or users for not keeping their machines up to date, and for visiting websites other than news.bbc.co.uk, www.tesco.com, www.ba.com and a few other well-chosen sites.

Care less

I wasn't particularly chuffed to read this week that Microsoft is going to back away from its OneCare antivirus and security solution, which I know has had a mixed reputation in the past, but in my experience on several occasions had no problems in ripping out nasties from some well-infected computers. Microsoft is going to downgrade the product to a freebie and call it "Morror". The press release says: "This streamlined solution will [...] provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs." If Morror can take on the likes of Mebroot and win then I'll applaud it. Or, actually I won't because if Microsoft can't deliver a comprehensive AV and security solution with Morror then it's time for a public naming and shaming of the people responsible. It will be, after all, their OS and their security and their protection software. There will be no excuses, no "yes but", and no "we patched it really quickly!" this time around. We just want it to work, please.