BBC Bill Gates Interview Part 2: Security

securitas writes "In the second of two parts, the BBC's Stephen Cole of the technology show Click Online interviews Bill Gates about Windows, viruses, security, spam, 'trustworthy computing', Longhorn and being anti-competitive. Sample quote: 'Certainly you can never underestimate the level of malicious people out there who are going to try to take advantage of whatever things there are. That's why we made trustworthy computing the top priority.' Streaming media in Real format is also available. [Video: Broadband | Narrowband] You can read the first half about the 'digital lifestyle' in Part 1: Bill Gates plots a Windows future. Here is the Slashdot discussion of the first part of the interview."

Comments

Re:Sorry Bill but you're full of shit

[Tim C]

Why oh why did they think it was a good idea to have an RPC server on by default when there's probably less than 1% of users who would use the feature?

Switch it off (it is possible, but not straightforward) and see what breaks; it's an essential component, right or wrong.

How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count.

So, you don't actually know, then? How can you criticise them meaningfully if you don't know? Saying "I can't remember, but I'm sure it's had lots!" is just spreading FUD.

And, thanks to Microsoft integrating the Internet Exploder

That just looks childish and detracts further from your argument

engine so tightly into their OS, if a bug affects IE then it probably also affects Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Help and gawd knows what else.

The alternative, of course, is to have seperate HTML rendering components for every application that wishes to render HTML. That would lead to bloat, unnecessarily duplicated code, differing standards compliance across applications, multiple codebases to fix, and all the other bad things that pointlessly replicating code leads to.

The correct thing to do would be to publish a fixed API and make the rendering engine to use a configurable choice (whether system-wide or per app) so that other people could easily write their own or adapt (eg) Gecko to comply, giving users a choice.

Incidentally, the same is true of KHTML, which (last time I looked) was integrated pretty tightly into KDE. True, you have a choice to not use KDE, but then I seem to be managing pretty well using XP and not using IE, OE, etc.