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MS Cites National Security to Justify Closed Source
guacamolefoo writes: "It was recently reported in eWeek that "A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
(Emphasis added.) The follow up from Microsoft is even better: As a result of the flaws, Microsoft has asked the court to allow a "national security" carve-out from the requirement that any code or API's be made public. Microsoft has therefore taken the position that their code is so bad that it must kept secret to keep people from being killed by it. Windows - the Pinto of the 21st century."
When in doubt, raise concerns about terrorism, or inappropriately use 9/11 as a crutch. The new coin of Washington (both east and west it seems).
Nothing will ever be the same again indeed.
If the code is so bad as to be dangerous, shouldn't the government make them recall the code and return a properly functioning version?
If a car was dangerous enough to possibly cause death, wouldn't the government require a recall? Wouldn't the media jump on them like rabid wolves like they did Firestone? Wouldn't people avoid the things like they did Firestone?
Three things need to happen in order for people to start getting serious about software security and reliability:
1) A software system with 1 or more serious _known_ flaws must be used on a worldwide scale by a government agency or large company.
2) That software must then fail.
3) The failure must cause thousands of deaths or hundreds of billions of dollars in loss or damage.
The result will be like the 9/11 of software...when the world wakes up and realizes that we have become so dependent on software systems for our daily lives that we actually have to start caring whether or not they work correctly. We need to start taking an engineering approach to software and KNOW (not think) that it will operate as advertised.
I'm actually hoping that this will occur sooner than later. The later it happens, the more catastrophic the result will be and the less time we'll have to rectify the problem before it happens again.