[ Thanks to Derek
Jamensky for this link. ]
“Lesson learned in elementary school: The quickest way to make
anybody suspicious of you is to tell them that you are keeping a
secret from them. Apparently, this simple lesson is lost upon the
commanders and demagogues at Microsoft. They maintain that secrecy
is the answer to greater security, which just also happens to
contribute to their fiscal bottom line. In light of the recent
break-ins at Microsoft’s HQ, let’s examine this a little
further.”
“Along with the inevitable drive for ever-higher corporate
profit, a misguided sense of what security is drives proprietary
software development and the secrecy practices of large software
corporations. Microsoft assumes that the less you know about their
products, the better. This ignorance helps them to maintain their
market dominance, as they try to muddle the public’s brains with
the argument that secrecy is good for security. If it’ s not public
knowledge, then anybody who knows about it should be working for
Microsoft. And you can trust them, right? Microsoft technicians
have their back doors to potentially every Windows system on the
planet, and we are supposed to trust that they use this knowledge
in accordance with the law and certain ethical standards — which
we generously assume every time we install Windows into a
network.”
“The recent Microsoft cracks should do two things (at
least). First, they will further erode Microsoft’s credibility in
the security department — if they can’t secure their own
networks, then why should anybody believe their claims about
security at all? The other thing the hacks should illustrate is
the flaw of closed-sourced model of software development. It’s
nice to keep secrets because it makes you more profits, but it also
makes you a target, and it makes everyone less secure in the end.
There’s safety in numbers, not secrecy.”