My PC is very slow.
(This is actually a drum mat, sold in the UK.)
I checked it out with my malware and anti-viral. The malware detector didn't find anything serious. The anti-viral found almost 2,000 copies of a file called sgregister.
I looked it up. Sounded dangerous. I checked message boards for advice. They suggested a "free" product. Click a link, download it, load it, let it run — waste a few hours. Then my fear is confirmed — you have 743 serious errors.
But my "Free" software won't fix any more than a half-dozen of those errors. If I want them fixed, I have to register and buy it. I have to pay.
This protection racket has been going and growing for a decade. It started with the anti-virals, but these evolved, slowly, so that one is as good as another. Then came the anti-spyware products and "registry cleaners." The companies that make these products don't cooperate with one another like the anti-viral guys. Some seem to be in league with the very forces they claim to be fighting.
If you know of a problem, and you insist on getting paid by users to fix it, but you don't share either the problem or fix with other companies offering the same service, you're engaged in a protection racket.
The problem is endemic to the architecture of Windows. Windows was not designed with security in mind. It was designed to enable, and to support the past. While Apple has dumped its underlying operating system several times, leaving millions of users in the lurch, Microsoft insisted on backward compatibility.
Linux, descended from Unix, doesn't have this problem. That's because Linux has a highly rigid, modular design. Microsoft rejected this approach, too. First because the original MS-DOS was a dumbed-down version of Unix. Second because as it added functions Microsoft didn't add them in a structured way — because that would copy Unix.
What we're left with is something much like a house of cards. One that is collapsing on all of us.
Some smart people, like Bruce Schneier, call this whole problem inevitable. Any claims that such a massive problem can be fixed are like 2+2=3, he says. Maybe, if we start with the idea of security, if we work in a modular way, if if we isolate application code from what's important, we can at least make stuff better.
Google says they're going to try.
I wish them luck.
Because this is the last chance clients have. Servers can generally protect themselves. They have professionals working for them, and professional services behind them, monitoring their every move. Server problems are generally caused by traffic "rushing to the rail," by the difficulty of scaling. And when a site is hurt by the bad guys, there are others offering the same service.
One more important point. We enter the second decade of the 21st century one month from now. We are entering the world of Neuromancer, for real this time, and it's going to be a lot more interesting, a lot more complex and nuanced, than the book was.
