Moving beyond the Microsoft monoculture
by Glyn Moody
For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.
It's the end of an era – for UK journalists, at least. Thanks to the clever new site called churnalism.com, it will be possible for readers of mainstream news sites to check whether the article they are reading is simply a re-hashed press release. As the site's FAQ explains:
The site compresses all articles published on national newspaper websites, on BBC news, and Sky news online, into a series of numbers based on 15 character strings (using a hash function) and then stores them in a fast access database. When someone pastes in some text and clicks 'compare', the churn engine compresses the text entered and then searches for similar compressions (or 'common hashes'). If the engine finds any articles where the similarity is greater than 20%, then it suggests the article may be churn. Churnalism.com is powered off the back of the database of over three million compressed articles in journalisted.com.
I know I have nothing to fear on this score – not so much because I don't re-hash press releases (although I don't), more that I look at them so rarely there's no chance of my articles being infected by PR copy even by accident.
One reason that I no longer look at press releases is because nearly all of them in the field of computing make one, huge, annoying assumption: that the entire world uses Microsoft products. This means that the vast majority of press releases are not just irrelevant to my needs, but positively insulting to my worldview.
And there is a particular circle of journalistic hell reserved for PR companies that send out press releases about the very latest terrifying, deadly, apocalyptic virus that I simply *must* know about. Because these too assume that everyone is using Microsoft products, and therefore don't even bother mentioning the rather relevant fact that it is generally *only* those benighted souls still staggering through the Microsoft miasma that are affected.
That omission is not some minor detail, because it blurs the distinction between malware and Windows malware. As a result, it leads non-technical users to assume that malware is a universal and unavoidable fact of computing life, and that you just have to accept that your machine will be trashed every so often, and your bank details stolen once in a while, and that you will always have to fork out what is literally protection money to one of the anti-virus companies for constant updates to their software (unless you know about free software apps like ClamWin, of course.)
What all this overlooks, of course, is that other operating systems – notably GNU/Linux and MacOS – are barely affected by these problems. To be sure, malware does exist for them, but is so rare that few of us ever see it (I certainly haven't in the last 15 years of using free software). So this apparently “trivial” omission of information – that all these deadly viruses and trojans are actually for *Windows* systems – does a huge disservice to the readers of churnalism based on them (particularly when it comes from a nominally serious news organisation like the BBC). That's because it fails to reveal that there are alternatives to Windows that are far less susceptible to these kinds of attacks, and that would enable users to avoid many of these problems that they put up with on a daily basis.
The bad news is that the disconnect between how things are reported – as if people only used Windows – and the reality, is getting worse; the good news is that it's getting worse because we are finally emerging from the Microsoft monoculture that encouraged such lazy churnalism in the first place.
The death of the Microsoft monoculture is most evident in the world of browsers. After the collapse of Netscape, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was not so much a browser as the internet itself for most people. Accessing the internet meant clicking on that blue “e”. Microsoft's dominance was such that it stopped trying: Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 and was not replaced by version 7 until 2006 – an eternity in internet time.
Today, Internet Explorer is losing market share rapidly, and is down to 56% according to a recent survey. But just as significantly, it's not only Firefox that is gaining: Google's Chrome has over 10% (with Firefox on 22%). What we are seeing is the emergence of a browser world with three significant players. That's clearly even better than replacing one monoculture with another, even when the latter is open source.
Mobile and beyond
The situation is broadly similar in the increasingly important world of smartphones. According to one survey, Apple has a 28.6% share, RIM 26.1% share and Android 25.8% share. The exact figures aren't really the issue: what this clearly shows is a dynamic market with several powerful players – and no monoculture. Moreover, things are likely to get even more complicated once HP's WebOS smartphones start arriving – to say nothing of Nokiasoft's models, when they eventually turn up.
This diversity in the smartphone sector might seem to have little to do with the Microsoft monoculture – after all, these are just phones, right? Wrong: smartphones are essentially powerful computers that fit in your pocket or purse and happen to have a telephone built in. In terms of functions and features, very little separates a smartphone from traditional desktops or notebooks. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that more and more people – especially in developing countries – will use smartphones as their primary means of carrying out computing tasks and accessing the internet.
And that, of course, means that the overall computing ecosystem is becoming even more diverse: in addition to programs like Firefox and Chrome being more widely used on traditional PCs, we are seeing a huge growth in form factors other than PCs.
And it's not just about smartphones. The undoubted success of Apple's iPad has introduced yet another option, one that is a kind of hybrid between the touch screen based smartphone and the larger format PCs. Although it's true that the tablet sector is pretty much a monoculture at the moment, that is certain to change as the flood of Honeycomb-based Android tablets arrives this year. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect these to take off in the same way as Android phones have done in the last year, leading to a duopoly in this market. Alongside these, there will also be other options, for example tablets based on HP's WebOS and those running Windows 7, although it's not clear how popular either of those will be.
Taken together, all these disparate moves to alternative programs and alternative platforms means that the Microsoft monoculture based around Windows, Internet Explorer and Office running on an Intel-based desktop PC is definitively fading away. Unfortunately, that doesn't imply that malware problems, estimated to cause $13 billion worth of economic damage back in 2007, and probably much higher now, will simply fade away too.
One reason is the residual effect of the Microsoft monopoly. For example, as the story from The H Security explains, new versions of the ZeuS banking trojan for mobile phones work because of vulnerabilities in Windows:
The most important step is still infecting a Windows PC. Then, victims view a specially crafted web site that masquerades as a security update for the victim's cell phone.
Victims are asked to enter their cell phone number so they can receive a link for the download in a text message. The PC infected with the trojan then promptly sends a text message containing a link to what appears to be a new security certificate. Users are then asked to download and install the certificate on their mobile phones, which requires an internet connection on the phone.
The downloaded file contains the mobile version of ZeuS, which then analyses and forwards all incoming text messages.
This means that the baleful effect of the Microsoft monoculture will still be felt for many years to come as it is used as a kind of gateway to the new platforms that are arriving but which remain tethered to it through the user.
And of course it is that user who remains the fundamental weak point that can always be exploited, whatever the underlying platform. But at least the emerging ecosystem of multiple hardware and software systems makes it much harder for malware authors to make correct assumptions about what else is available for them to subvert and deploy.
The passing of the Microsoft monoculture is no panacea for today's computing security problems, but the richer, more complex world that is replacing it will certainly be better than what people have been putting up with for the last decade and a half without fully realising it.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
An avid fan and user of Linux and all free and open source OS's and software, I was excited when I found a bargain Android Tablet PC. But it wasn't what it was suppose to be. Thus, this blog was born. I have made it usable (with much effort), but feel that people should be aware of the fact that not all "Android" devices are necessarily Android compatible and certainly aren't "productive" out of the box. Good deals aren't always a good deal.