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Friday, July 12, 2002 |
Not Getting It Hall of Fame
Hootie Johnson, of the Augusta National Golf Club, rants publicly about pressure to admit women to the club. Apparently, four decades of American life have passed Augusta by.
"We will not be bullied, threatened or intimidated. Obviously, Dr. Burk and her colleagues view themselves as agents of change, and feel any organization that has stood the test of time and has strong roots of tradition and does not fit their profile, needs to be changed. We do not intend to become a trophy in their display case. There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership, but that timetable will be ours, and not at the point of a bayonet. We do not intend to be further distracted by this matter. We shall continue our traditions and prepare to host the Masters as we have since 1934." [The New York Times (free registration required)]
Welcome to the Not Getting It Hall of Fame, Mr. Johnson.
Microsoft: Putting the Job Security in Security Since 1975
I'm considering taking a month and covering my office door with announcements of Microsoft security problems. Any bets on how quickly my door will be totally covered?I used to joke with my friends that we should be glad of how bug-ridden DOS and WIndows programs were; if all of our users switched to Macintoshes, we'd be out of a job. But the joke has lost its humor. Our security people are on the same stretch of hall as I am,and too often I stop in to look for help only to find out they're overloaded dealing with the latest Microsoft related security problem.
You can see the source of part of the problem in Pascal Zachary's book Showstopper!, which is about the original development of Windows NT.
At the outset of the NT project, Cutler treated security as an afterthought, another item on a long list of features.
The problem isn't particularly Cutler, the problem is that it is possible to reach the top of the industry (Cutler already had the creation of DEC's VMS operating system to his credit) without understanding that security is part of the basic architecture of a system, not just a feature. There's precious little sign that this has changed, anywhere in the industry, in the years since the NT project.
New security flaw in Outlook, IE. A bug in Microsoft's ActiveX scripting component allows network attackers to peek at cookies, read files and even run programs on a victim's PC. [CNET News.com]
