Comment Articles

Model security from Microsoft?

Published: 12 Mar 2004 11:55 GMT

"None of this is rocket science," he wrote, referring to a problem he was having installing printer software using the application's user interface. "The problem isn't that the right things are technically difficult to do... The problem is that the [software] designers' attitude was wrong. They never stepped outside their assumptions."

Some projects are doing it right. A good example of a tool that has focused on ease-of-use is Nessus, which scans a network for signs of vulnerabilities and not only tells the user what it has found but also explains why the issue poses a security problem.

Still, any Linux version that claims to be for the desktop might want to borrow a page from Microsoft's textbook and give users a central place to see the status of their data and computer system.

In the high-society circuit, they say you can never be too rich or too thin. So it goes that when developing operating systems, you can't ever make a product too accessible or too conscious about security.

Robert Lemos is a senior staff writer at CNET News.com.