The Perception of System Security
Valery Pryamikov has posted an excellent little article discussing how the perception of system security has changed across the software industry over the years. The article focuses on Microsoft's perceptions and behaviour, but other software vendors and OS flavours are also mentioned here and there.
(Please be forgiving of the occasional typo and poor grammar as English is not Valery's first language.)
<quote who="Valery Pryamikov" where="On Evolution of Microsoft Perception of System Security">
I wrote my first < 20 lines FORTRAN program back in 1982, when I was first year university math student. Year 1987 was a starting year of my professional carrier as programmer (and I’ve been programming ever since). It was back in the frontier days of the PC when Microsoft was a lot smaller, IBM seemed a whole lot bigger, and Apple owned personal computer territory as far as the eye could see. Many things have been dramatically changed since than. Computing industry matured and evolved from naïve diskless Commodore computers, from 1-2 MHz Intel 8086/8088 processors and first IBM PC specification, from commercial programs measured in couple of Kbytes and produced in a couple of the programmer/month effort to the most research and resources demanding industry with whooping [sic] processing power that have already became [sic] concerned with the physical limitations like speed of light and size of electrons. Grows [sic] of the industry was naturally accompanied by corresponding shifts of mentality as different goals became of [sic] major concern. In the early days of disconnected little private computers we were mostly interested in usability and richness of feature set. That all changed since we became addicted to our ubiquitously interconnected computing world. In the movie of “Matrix”, agent Smith tells Neo that they known [sic] that he is living double life: first life as Mr. Anderson – program writer for respectable computer firm and another life in computers under hacker’s name Neo. And as Neo’s “life in computers” taught him that “there is no spoon”, our “life in computers” taught us that security is the most significant element of our interconnected wellbeing [sic].
Over the years Microsoft has played utmost role in industry grows [sic]. There are people that like Microsoft and there are people that dislike Microsoft, but none can refuse importance of Microsoft role in achievement of computing industry and its influence on our everyday life. So, I thought that could be interesting to look back on evolution of perception of system security as such and evolution of Microsoft’s perception of system security in particular.
[more...]
</quote>
Edit: Added spaces to "where" in <quote ...> so it wraps rather than running off the edge of the page.
