Without addressing any of these issues, or giving any indication they were even considered, the report concludes by describing Microsoft as a clear and present danger, comparing it to insinuated past “threats” from IBM and AT&T. The final recommendations made by the authors call for published interface specifications for Windows and Office; development of “alternative sources of functionality” comparable to what the report describes as the “highly successful ‘plug and play’ technology” (which most users refer to as 'plug and pray' and requires no small amount of user intervention to get most new devices working properly) and to “Work with consortia of hardware and software vendors to define specifications and interfaces for future developments, in a way similar to the Internet Society 's RFC process to define new protocols for the Internet.”
As if the RFC process is any model of success, considering that any number of threats could be stopped, discarded, or rejected if clients, servers and applications worked only within RFC-compliant bounds and it assumes that the RFCs had been devised taking these issues into consideration beforehand. This seldom occurs.
Certainly the problem of malicious code is not trivial and thus we cannot expect that the solution will be. However, when notables such as Daniel Geer, Sc.D, former Chief Technical Officer for @Stake, Charles P. Pfleeger, Ph.D, Master Security Architect for Exodus Communications, Inc., Bruce Schneier, Founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, John S. Quarterman, Founder of InternetPerils and Matrix NetSystems, Inc., Perry Metzger, Independent Consultant, Rebecca Bace, CEO of Infidel, and Peter Gutmann, a Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland put their collective knowledge together, one hopes for real insight. Instead, we receive such “salient” points as: new users represent the largest number of new users and don’t put all your eggs in one basket, summarized with a conclusion bordering on expensive chaos that can only be described as lacking insight.
