Imagine if Microsoft ran a hospital. In most other hospitals, infectious patients are isolated from other patients to keep disease from spreading, and instruments are kept sterile for each patient. In Microsoft's hospital, everyone would be in one big ward, regardless of the spread of disease. And it'd be up to the patients to force the doctors to wash their hands and don clean surgical gowns before each visit. And they'd have to figure out how to sterilize the equipment themselves — assuming they knew enough to ask for sterile equipment in the first place.
I bring this up because a bit of complete nonsense just popped up on Red Herring, regarding a recent security flaw in one of Google's services. Google fixed the problem, but in the meantime we received another rendition of the tired old excuse about how Microsoft's problems with viruses stem from its position as the Number One operating system. Red Herring pushes the idea that Google will "become" a magnet for hackers.
Clearly, Red Herring is far, far behind the times. They seem to that think the world's largest search engine — one that generates zillions of dollars of revenue that sloshes around the Internet, in great part via poorly-authenticated "clicks" — isn't already a target for hackers.
Well, no. Google is a target for hackers, but they're far more secure than Microsoft because Google runs a tight ship. Microsoft's problems with viruses stem from its poor design; in no small part because they deliberately refuse to disaggregate their software into separate modules to limit the spread of infection.
Topics: · google · microsoft · security
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