The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [106]
There was some software business around. There was Microsoft, which was a monopoly. Microsoft was never secure, because of the hatred. Microsoft was hated everywhere, despised, mercilessly attacked. Sabotaged, tormented, humiliated. Microsoft was a pathetically vulnerable monopoly, because every hacker in the world who knew anything at all about computers understood how to attack Microsoft and its products.
Microsoft’s operating systems had never been built to resist the focused hatred of every alienated hacker in the whole world. No single system could ever bear up under that level of focused intellectual assault. It was like trying to save Saigon when everyone in the whole world was Viet Cong. There were not just dozens of holes in Big Bill’s code but thousands of holes. The patches of the holes wrecked the code, quite often. The patches of the holes had holes. Some of Microsoft’s holes were unrepairable even in principle.
Bill had more money than anybody in the whole wide world, but Bill didn’t have enough money to save himself. Except for the Microsoft operating system—a monopoly—and the Microsoft Office Suite—another monopoly—every other venture Bill had tried lost huge amounts of money. There were a couple of really pretty nice Microsoft computer games that made a little money. That was about it.
The biggest competitor that Microsoft faced wasn’t even a business. It was a new and terrible thing in the world. It was Open Source, a thing that frightened Microsoft so much they regarded it as a cancer.
Open Source aimed to eat away Bill’s empire and replace it with a swarming, leaderless ant pile of global hackers. And Open Source wasn’t a government any more than Open Source was a business. There was no one to negotiate with. There was no one to cut a deal with. There was no one to regulate. There was no one to bomb.
You could bribe them. But you could never bribe all of them. You could sue them, arrest some of them, but that really looked stupid, and besides, they were probably living in Finland.
Everyone claimed they wanted secure computers. Everyone was terrified of the consequences of the lawlessness, which were very bad and getting steadily worse. Viruses. Worms. Scam artists. Porn. Spam. Denial-of-service attacks. Organized crime. Industrial espionage. Stalking. Money laundering. The specter of infowar attacks on natural gas pipelines, aircraft control systems, dams, water reservoirs, sewage systems, telephones, and banks. Black horses snorting and stomping in the stables of the Digital Apocalypse.
You sat people down and you explained what computer insecurity really could do to them, and they got really, really scared and upset. They wanted something done about it. Until they figured out what effective security really meant for them, what it would do to them. Then no one really wanted secure computers. No one at all.
The spies didn’t want to fix the holes in computer security. Spies liked to spy on computers. Cops didn’t want to fix the holes in computer security. Cops liked to wiretap computers, and to grab them, open them up, and examine them right on the spot. Customers didn’t want to fix the holes in security. Customers didn’t want to ride a little motor scooter weighed down with a ton and a half of cumbersome locks and chains.
Scientists understood how to lock code down, but they hated intellectual property.
The military was sincerely good at really securing computers. The military excelled at defense. But they adored attack. The American military excelled at infowar, cyberwar, and electronic warfare. They were always making up horrible new methods of breaking, smashing, subverting, and violently destroying the whole works.
Business couldn’t do much about it. Business