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When Does Usability Become a Liability?
nasteric asks: "I caught myself in the middle of a very interesting discussion last Friday over Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee. The discussion had to do with usability and security. Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. They claimed making Linux a friend of Joe User will require it to 'open itself up' and become more susceptible to attack. Needless to say, this became an endless debate between our Microsoft Administrators and our Linux/Unix Administrators that will undoubtedly continue into the morning. Therefore I pose this question to the Slashdot community. Will making Linux more user friendly result in it becoming less secure? Hopefully your expertise will help shed some light on (and bring to and end) our discussion." Does decent usability necessarily imply the presence of vulnerabilities? Macs seem to have this area down pretty well, with little in the way of vulnerabilities. Can Linux software follow the same route?
As soon as autoexec.bat runs.
You are not the customer.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I think that the claim has very little validity. I think the truth is that it "becomes more vulnerable" when the average user is less educated about security issues.
Making Linux more user friendly, in my mind, means improving upon the features that revolve around the GUI. The great thing about Linux is how much you can customize it; you can strip away the GUI and have a powerful production-level server environment. This is different from Microsoft products, as the ease of usability encompases the operating system.
Linux is much more "modular", in that you can build exactly what you want; an installation could take up anywhere from a few megs to a few gigs. The security and vulnerability lies in the end user.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
Please, no comments about how Mac OS X was "attacked" by a trojan.
It doesn't "expose" some fatal flaw in the OS, nor is it some newly discovered exploit. All it is was an application that displayed a dialog box. Mac OS applications (with the exception of Cocoa applications) have always been able to have:
a.) any icon, and
b.) any name
The only remotely slightly interesting feature of this proof-of-concept was that it stored the executable code within an MP3 ID3 tag, and even contained valid MP3 data. But that's mostly irrelevant, since the executable code could be anywhere, and the code can't even be moved in raw binary form without destroying the resource fork. Though the major media outlets haven't picked up on the subtleties of this thanks to Intego's FUD-mongering and self-serving press release, this "trojan" is nothing more than a Carbon application. (Though, the discussion that comes of this will be fruitful: maybe Apple will revisit yet again the filesystem metadata vs. file extension dichotomy, and discuss novel ways of visually identifying executables, perhaps in the same fashion as aliases.)
So, to get on-topic, no, an OS doesn't necessarily have to become less secure to become user-friendly. Some (most?) of the security of an operating system, both from a user perspective and network perspective, comes from underlying philosophical design principles and fundamentals - not to mention the intensive peer examination that open source software encourages. Sure, some user-friendly "features", such as auto-opening attachments in the preview pane of Outlook, exist to make things "easier" for the user. But this is a wrongheaded approach: a sensible focus on security can solve the majority of problems without necessarily making it harder on the user. Ease of use and security aren't entirely, or even mostly, mutually exclusive.
The key is making security easy to use.
But the age-old technique of "tricking the user" will ALWAYS be possible via various means, on any OS on any platform.
...then you should have asked for their explanation of why OS X is more secure than Windows.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
Take the basic Linux safety measure. Having to log in as root to do anything significant. Win has this as well (admin, power user, etc) , but most people run as admin, partly because of crappy, admin-rights demanding software, partly because Win doesn't really tell you not to, but also partly because its a PITA to remember, and log in with, that secure PW to do any installs or maintenance.
A "user friendly Linux" (Lindows, anyone?) will have to be very, very careful not to end up down this same path.
On Windows they call it Administrator, on Linux they call it Root. It's the same thing, the user account that has no restrictions on it. Every user wants to run that way, because seeing a "permission denied" message on their own box just isn't going to make them consider the system user-friendly.
It's really more of a user eductation issue than a technical one. The best security practices are usually in counter to an element of ease of use.
Of course if you have elitist programmer types who use their case-modded Amiga's to talk to talk to each in Klingon don't expect your user experience to be one 'Joe User' can use or enjoy. If you are one of those people who are disdainful of people not as smart as you and want to keep Linux/OSS in the hands of your CRT tanned brethren then by all means continue to disparage and FUD usability all day long - just don't complain about Linux's adoption - EVER.
A few things for folks to remember:
-_-
Extremely poor analogy.
We spend literally decades learning to read and write and even then very few people are actually any good at writing books. Natural language is also, compared to computer languages, extremely stable. Natural language are also exactly that - natural. Our brains evolved to support them and our languages evolved over millenia to suit our brains.
Understanding images is considerably more important than language and certainly long pre-dates any human language- written or spoken.
And I'm sure you've heard the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words".
So, your point would be?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
If popularity breeds vulnerability, Apache should have far more vulnerabilities than IIS. It doesn't.
This theory needs only a slight modification to become valid...
It's popularity among stupid people that breeds vulnerabilities.
Apache may not have very many holes, but it's far too easy to write a PHP script that gives away the keys to the kingdom if you're not careful. A password of "password" is insecure on any system.
Usability doesn't mean "avoids security." It means the interface is easy to use. You can do this *with* security. For example, just asking the user to re-type their password before running admin tools, even if they have rights to run them. (No su'ing to root; no process should *ever* run as root with user input/control.) That means that a virus can't just start running admin commands without the user knowing.
SELinux (or, hopefully, a similar system with a sane configuration/management interface) can also assist with this by limiting what vulnerabilities can do.
And the interface design itself helps. Microsoft's attempts at usability equate to "do everything automatically." Compare this to GNOME where the design is based not on automation, but on streamlining. I fully believe GNOME is *more* usable than Windows in almost every way, yet it hasn't the security problems as apps don't try to auto-run executables from untrusted sources, embed scripting languages with system-modification abilities, etc.
In truth, the interface can be designed such that it makes using security easier, vs hiding security away.
"Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. " Ummm... what makes a Microsoft Admininstrator the authority on vulernability and usability?
one picture is worth a thousand words?
Seriously though, I'm an author and do a lot of writing. We are a visual species - look at the popularity of TV, movies, and video games. Why are GUIs popular? It gives you a lot of information in a small amount of space. Think small applets, like CPU usage or disk usage. More information can be sent quicker using a pie graph and setting colors than just giving raw capacity and percentage used.
But writing is much more precise. When you write something down, you need to know *exactly* what you're saying and who you're saying it to. Otherwise the meaning could be lost.
One nice trick Apple discovered is to have the users be non-root, yet still administrative. (Did you hear that, Lindows?) They did this by creating tools that run as root, but which require authentication to run. For example, a mortal user who is an administator can't trash the whole filesystem by dragging and dropping important items, because they are not root. But they can run Software Update, an application for downloading patches, by supplying a username and password.
On Linux you can add users to the group "wheel" and make them sudoers with much the same effect.
Apple also made many important directories like /etc invisible from within the GUI, which I think is a great idea as long as power users can turn it off.
Seems easy and secure to me...
Because commandline is NOT END-USER FRIENDLY. Things are different when you're a system admin. Click a picture of a music note, you get music. Click a picture with a music note flowing into a CD, you burn your CD. That's much easier than " CD_DA TRACK AUDIO FILE "secret-pregap.wav" START FILE "track1.wav""
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
All the "secure code" in the world wont shield the system from a clueless user.
/ /dev/rand > /dev/dsp
As secure as you think OSX is, anyone who wanted to write an application to fuck stuff up, call it "Super Happy Funtime Sexy Game", and email it to morons, could do so just as easily as they could with a VBScript file.
I could write:
#!\bin\sh
rm -rf
cat
echo Linux is teh gay!
Email it to some stupid people, tell them they have to run it as root or else they wont see the video of Condoleeza Rice's tits.
Stupid people will run what came with the box they bought at Best Buy. When those boxes start shipping with linux, they'll be on linux. The REALLY stupid people shop at K-Mart, who I understand are in the business of ubercheap linux boxes these days.
Be afraid, be very afraid, of the rootkits that get put on this new army of lindows boxes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As you've noted, Mac OSX has managed it (although in all honesty it probably isn't the focus of as many attacks as Windows). I think that the main problem is that if users are running their browsers, email clients etc under their own uid, and they contract a virus then it's going to cause damage to all their files. I don't know about anyone else here, but I value the files in my /home more than the rest of the OS, which can easily be reinstalled (yes, I do back up, BTW).
;-)
I think that maybe all vulnerable processes, like web browsers, irc clients etc should run under a separate uid from the user (maybe each user should have 2 uid's - one normal, and one restricted so that it can only access a subdirectory of the users home). So rather than Mozilla launching as user fredbloggs:fredbloggs, it launches as "fredbloggs_restricted:fredbloggs_restricted" by default. The user could then chown some directory to be writable to fredbloggs_restricted" for downloads, cache etc.
Maybe this is already implemented? The real problem though is that a user could still build and run something they downloaded, potentially wiping all their files, unless a mechanism automatically made anything they installed themselves, run as the restricted user and not their own uid:gid.
Does any of that make sense?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
There is no need to log into an admin account to do any of this kind of stuff under OS X.
I've also never seen an OS X app that says you have to give all users all perms to the root folder, or have everyone running as admin, or open up the program folder for everyone to write to because settings are being stored in the wrong dang place.
Windows could be a lot more secure, but Microsoft doesn't go far enough to shame software vendors into sticking to the logo requirements. How many times have you Windows admins had to support a desktop app or driver for a peripheral that REQUIRES admin or power user rights? It's insane that there are Windows programmers that are still writing crap like this today.
GUIs let you explore until you find what you want by pointing and clicking on things. With command lines, you need to know the commands, and the options, before starting. That means that you need some sort of training before you start using the command line. So in your analogy, you'd have to "learn" the language of the OS before you can start 'writing' anything at all. Learning English actually took you a very, very long time, even if you don't remember it.
Once you have that training, the command line is a very useful tool. But if you can't get the training, and aren't self-sufficient or technically apt enough to go to the bookstore and buy a book on how to use the command line, you're screwed.
That's why people like having icons for things. The message icon is your mail program. Don't have to remember what it's name is, or where it's at. Just click.
Actually most virus arrivals now do need a luser. Email gateways are doing more scanning and keeping outlook users from becoming auto-lusers. However, one of the latest/best scams is to zip the virus and password protect it (quasi-encrypted) so the gateway scanner can not scan it. Then include instructions in the email that social engineer some luser into unzipping it with the supplied password and running it. I've seen some pretty good email virus scams recently, the text is REALLY good, definitely luser friendly.
Even with 4 byte words (or 8 byte words on some monster big iron), 4000 bytes is not enough for all but the tiniest gif file. Now, gif being a 256 color only format, with no serious compression and an inability to depict sharp photographs of any significant resolution, I contend that no,
A picture is not ~1000 words.
This means that yes, a trojan horse could run, and yes, it could keep running until the user logs out, and maybe even add a login item on a per-user basis, but it can't install anything into the system that runs at startup unless the user explicitly enters a password to say that "yes, I really expected this to be installing something". This simple authentication requirement would have prevented 99% of what has made Windows viruses so virulent.
In fact, the best form of user-friendly security basically amounts to having a bunch of policies for things that shouldn't generally happen, then shouting at the user and asking if you really want to do that. This concept has been popping up repeatedly on the Mac platform ever since the classic "GateKeeper" virus checker extension. I remember saying that I wanted to see an OS do exactly this sort of sanity checking (don't let an application modify the OS without user permission) back when I was still in elementary school (mid-eighties).
So here's what I don't get.... If this was obvious to me at about age 10, what does that say about companies that still haven't figured out how to implement such a basic security measure? And why would anyone in his/her right mind use an OS like Windows whose security policies haven't caught up to what seemed obvious to a 10-year-old kid almost 20 years ago?
For shame.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Naw, it's even more simple than that. It is about choices. Staring at a blank command-line offers no intuitive options. You have no idea where to start as a n00b. Basically a graphical interface enables a user, without prior experience, to poke around and discover - simply by exploring all options.
What is easier - a multiple choice test, or a fill in the blank test?
ymmv
Wrong. Language studies have shown that computer langauges are not equivalent to conventional lanugages . One study, in part, was undertaken to identify whether teaching and using computers at an early age is beneficial. Unsurprisingly, it showed absolutely no benefit. Unlike spoken languages, where the earlier you start, the better you are, computer languages showed no such advantage. That's good news for adults.
Sorry, I do not have the source available. The study was discussed in the NYT within the last year or so.
Things that need to be expressed before my opinion:
:)
-Microsoft does not hire retards. Their programmers are skilled.
-IBM,Sun,Novell,etc, do not hire retards. Their programmers are probably equally skilled with Microsoft's.
-Linux was inspired by Unix
-Unix is a multi-user operating system originally designed during the dawn of computing for big iron mainframes accessible by client terminals via command line.
-Computer "users" at the time of the creation and dominance of Unix knew, more often than not, how to program, do shell scripts, etc. They were very computer-literate. To use a computer in that age meant you knew how a computer worked.
-Windows began as a (more or less) single user operating system intended to run on PCs, not mainframes, and is used more often than not by people who know nothing of programming, or how a computer works abstractly.
Before you jump to say that Microsoft produces crap code, think logically. The Windows O/S may be considered to be a history lesson for all the O/S programmers out there. Learn from it. Sure, they didn't invent the GUI. Sure they weren't the first windowing O/S. But consider that Windows is the first operating system to reach the level of adoption that it has. They have to support every common architecture, network protocol, hardware design, etc, in the world.
If Windows serves any purpose to you guys at all, it is to illustrate what works, and what doesn't. From their example, user stupidity has been illustrated. Never more than now have programmers been aware of the need to balance ease of use with covering for the ignorance of a user. From their example, we've learned that the user really shouldn't be trusted to be a good admin, that firewalls are a good feature to build into an O/S, etc etc. Microsoft has proven useful in studying the effectiveness of GUI systems and their pitfalls.
Don't sit and criticize Microsoft. Take the lessons they had to learn the hard way, and use them to make better code. That's essentially what Apple did with OSX, even though for them it was a lot easier - they don't have to standardize for all hardware and software configs. They offered very limited backwards compatibility, as ugly compatibility hacks aren't good to keep in code
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
True, but only because you both share a common frame of reference. Communicating outside of a common frame of reference becomes much much more difficult and thus a much larger volume of data. Try getting food from a blind man in france.
This reminds me of something I've read. When Apple was engineering the GUI back in the early 1980's, early tendency in testing was to just use icons and imagery for buttons and functions, testing showed that this was disatrous however, and the best approach in terms of speed to learn and usability was to use both descriptive text and an icon.
Apparently, the lead engineer is quoted as saying "a word is worth a thousand pictures" when it comes to GUI design.
This sig has been deprecated.
Even a true or false question offers a question with options. A blank command line does neither. Even knowing to type man and a command requires
/u/s" command - your argument is not representative of typical usage. Also, icons are generally easy to associate visually with an application - if not, you run it and see what comes up. As a general rule, most applications will not mess with your data just by loading them up and MOST applications will not negatively affect your hardware - thus poking around is good.
a. To know that there is a `man' command
b. To know which command to even bother looking up.
Then expecting a n00b to dicipher a man page is a leap. I also have never seen an icon or have I even seen anyone make a shortcut to the "format c:
Also, you imply there are 'wrong' choices, when in fact, there is not really a 'wrong' choice per se, just not the specific function you're looking for. If this is the case, you choose one of the other choices and move forward. Now you know what that other function does for when you do need it and have also completed what you set out to do. Not likely to get the same quick understanding on cl.
The main benefit of a gui is the flattening of the learning curve. It is not as efficient as knowing exactly what you want to do at the cl - this is true, but gets you to a point to where you can be somewhat productive. Obviously being adept at the cl will make you more efficient.
ymmv
Below is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Windows was originally designed as a single-user, game-playing operating system. It had no concept of networking or segmented user space or file permissions, etc. These things, among others, were added on later as the need arose.
Windows was originally marketed to home users who wanted to play games and small businesses who wanted to track a few dozen or perhaps a few hundred accounts/clients.
Today, MS has positioned Windows as an Enterprise class OS. People who grew up playing games on Windows should know that this doesn't make sense.
I used to laugh when looking for patches for an NT4 domain that I administered a few years ago. I'd skip all of the new video (DirectX) enhancements that were constantly avaiable. What did gaming/video drivers have to do with domain controllers?
In short, you can't make something into something it's not... at least not without many problems. MS Windows is a classic example of this.