Why the Rokr Phone Is An Important Failure

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has some interesting commentary on the new iPod cellphone." From the article: "The music-player module works like an iPod - though it lacks the clickwheel that makes its big brothers function so slickly. But overall, the impression is distinctly underwhelming. The word on the streets is that far from being the revolutionary device that will bring about media 'convergence', the Rokr is, well, just the sum of its parts. And that, it seems to me, is the most interesting thing about it."

Comments

Executing Unapproved Binaries

[SumDog]

I like the 2nd argument, "Enumerating Badness"

I remember one think I learned from my 500 level network security class was something very basic, don't let users execute unapproved binaries.

Even in Windows as far back as NT you could use the NTConfig.pol to create a list of approved binaries that the user could execute. In more modern XP/2003 system, you can use Group Policies, but the principal is the same.

Sure word.exe could get replaced by a malicious program, but the only way for that to happen is for the user to have rights to replace word.exe and that shouldn't happen with the proper domain setup and systems that are kept up to date with patches.

Home systems are harder. It would be nice if we could adopt the same model. At home I use nothing by Linux systems and use a regular user account daily, only going to root when I need to. On corporate systems you can also take the extra step to limit the regular users abilities to compile and execute their own binaries.

With XP Home edition, we see the complete suspension of NTFS permissions as well as a host of other things that would save a lot of users a lot of trouble. If people used XP Pro as a regular user and only ran programs as administrator when necessary (and that involves the discretion of not installing tons of free programs that come loaded with spyware), we'd have a lot less security problems on home system.

Windows Vista is supposed to add in a lot of stuff that defaults to this functionality which should help, however what's really needed is more education for home users, in simply straightforward means, to help prevent a lot of these problems.