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Ask Slashdot: Who's Going To Win the Malware Arms Race?
An anonymous reader writes: We've been in a malware arms race since the 1990s. Malicious hackers keep building new viruses, worms, and trojan horses, while security vendors keep building better detection and removal algorithms to stop them. Botnets are becoming more powerful, and phishing techniques are always improving — but so are the mitigation strategies. There's been some back and forth, but it seems like the arms race has been pretty balanced, so far. My question: will the balance continue, or is one side likely to take the upper hand over the next decade or two? Which side is going to win? Do you imagine an internet, 20 years from now, where we don't have to worry about what links we click or what attachments we open? Or is it the other way around, with threats so hard to block and DDoS attacks so rampant that the internet of the future is not as useful as it is now?
Which side is going to win?
What makes you think it'll ever be over?
Here's a sports analogy, if you need one.
(the radio version was better but I couldn't find it)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That model (locked down like ChromeOS or iOS) is already succeeding in the marketplace over more traditional computing models, because it's what most people want. It's safer for them, and they want their devices to "just work".
It's the inevitable end result. Except for some techies, almost everybody I know just wants to surf the web and send pictures to their friends and have that "just work". They have almost all given up on Windows in favor of mobile OSs for 99% of what they do. They sometimes still "have a PC", but don't use it much out of fear of malware, where they feel free to use the tablet, which has the side benefit of a much simpler interface for them.
Market pressure will drive this.
Right with you on the javascript thing. I use noscript passively everywhere. The internet is just a nicer place when random javascript has to have permission to run at all.
I only run what I have to run.
I do the same thing with cookies. If a site doesn't need cookies then I don't let it store them on my machine. And third party cookies? ha. Basically never. I go through most of the internet like a ghost. They can track my IP I guess but that is a far cry from loading me up with tracking cookies or insane amounts of nested javascripts.
Have you ever seen how they're set up? They put one inside another inside another inside another. They're like those fucking russian dolls only worse. You'll have five or six nested inside of one script and then each of those could have two or three scripts inside of it and so on. It is insane. There needs to be some sort of passive standard that limits scripts to the host domain. I don't understand why you'd run foreign scripts. There's no reason for it. ANd if you REALLY need to, then fine... let people right click something to add an exception but if most people don't do that the web admins will craft less retarded sites... and hopefully the ad people will be less obnoxious.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We will lose if Adobe makes an OS
The number one complaint I hear from those forced to use Windows is that it takes forever to boot.
As one who uses Windows voluntarily, it's hard for me to relate to this. I typically boot it once a day (after turning it off the previous night), so it's no hardship to spend the couple of minutes it takes to boot on some other part of my morning routine.
My Android phone may be faster to boot than Windows, though I typically leave it on all the time since it doesn't use enough power to bother with turning it off at night. When I do restart it though, the process seems "slow". I think the reason is that I don't have cereal that needs eating or teeth that need brushing at those times.
So where's the hardship in waiting for Windows to boot? It ain't perfect, but boot time would be pretty far down on my own list of Windows complaints.