Computer Security is Bullshit

Computer security, just like privacy, is one of these things that generate a lot of noise and heated debates, yet it is only people with vested personal interests are the ones who really worry about it.

Users don't give a shit. My humble evidence is built on hundreds of support emails and personal observation of how humans use their computers. They will continue to download and launch viruses as long as their friends keep sending them infectious links. And no amount of warning dialogs or passwords will stop them. Why? Because their friend thought that sheep jumping from under their windows were funny. And folks will take their time to disable any jailing software that stands between them and jumping sheep. Sheep always wins.

Security-minded consumer software is useless. But makers of anti-viruses want us to believe we need that stuff. We don’t. Their creations only make everything else work worse: anti-viruses and firewalls slow our computers down and cause crashes in other programs we use, those that actually do something useful. 

It saddens me enormously that everything but port #80 on the Internet is blocked, everything except HTTP is banned and most users of my software will be threatened and screamed at by their own computers.

This security hysteria chokes the innovation. It restricts software developers to sit jailed forever in this little crippled world of browser runtimes with 90% of modern PC capabilities unavailable to them. Installing software became a major no-no these days, thus we have resorted to running web pages, an equivalent of MS DOS technology: with primitive animation, slow graphics and proliferation of crappy and non-standardized user interfaces. Major advances is consumer computing (like Apple’s “Core Animation”) go largely unnoticed because they’re not available to developers.

This brings me to Googe’s native client. (what triggered me to post this rant). Will it succeed? I mean will anyone ever care about it? Lets see...

JVM has been around for nearly 15 years being many times more powerful than Mozilla and WebKit's wildest dreams, yet it has failed outside of data centers because it never allowed OSX programmers to write true OSX programs or Windows programmers to write true Windows programs, and I see no reason why browser-based "jail boxes" will be different. 

And if you want to go after the consumer market, you need true OSX or Windows programs. For the enterprise - yes, you can get away with Java or AIR or any of these jailed boxes: Enterprise will eat anything you throw at it because users of enterprise software get paid to use it. And you can make anyone use just about anything if you pay them for the inconvenience.

But if you want people to open up their wallets in privacy of their homes, you'd have to do a lot better than that. Otherwise be like others and go with a “web platform” to be locked forever in this eyeball-heavy market of free online crap supported by canadian pharmacy advertising.

Booo-ga-ga!