Category Archives: history

Vista Didn’t Fail Because of Security

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Bruce Schneier points in his blog to an article in The Telegraph in which Steve Ballmer blames the failure of Vista on security. Every security person around should clear their throat loudly. Security is not what made Vista unpalatable.

Many people liked Vista. My tech reporter friends not only adored it, but flat couldn’t understand why people didn’t adore it. I have a number of other friends who adored it. In assessing Vista, this is important to keep in mind. Despite its bad rep, many people liked it. So why did many people not like it?

First, there were the gamers. Before Vista came out, Microsoft did a lot of marketing Vista to gamers. There were kiosks at gaming conventions and other places touting Vista as a gaming platform.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Reliable tests at the time said that Vista ran games about 20% slower than XP. Compounding this was that among the drivers that were dodgy when it first came out were video drivers. Many gamers felt that they had been sold a pig in the poke, and there was merit to this claim. Hardcore gamers are people who will spend money on bleeding-edge kit, and it was precisely this bleeding-edge kit that didn’t work well at first. And whatever it was that made games run slower (even if it was security features), that’s not the point. Microsoft’s statements to the gamers was that their gaming experience would be better on Vista, and it was worse. Once the 4chan crowd starts making memes about suckage, you’re behind the eight-ball.

Second, there were the cheapies. Many machines were marked as Vista-capable that either weren’t, or could only run the basics of Vista and not the fancy new stuff. There is an aphorism that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away. The problem is that most of the PC makers will try to sell you the cheapest possible computer, and these cheapest possible computers just didn’t have enough oomph to do Aero and the cool features in Vista. Microsoft took more than Intel gave and the customers felt they’d been sold a pig the poke. There were even lawsuits over this, and it added to Vista’s bad rep.

Third, there were the people on laptops. For whatever reasons, when Vista first came out, it was slow on laptops. One of my co-workers bought a ThinkPad to run Vista on for testing alongside her existing XP laptop, and it was much slower than the XP laptop running side-by-side.

I will add another personal anecdote. My brother-in-law bought my sister a brand-new Vista laptop. It ran slower than his older XP laptop. It was so bad that he would turn the screen of his XP laptop away so that she wouldn’t see him running XP and mentally compare it to her new laptop.

On the other hand, to repeat, the people who had high-end machines but not bleeding-edge machines adored Vista. If you had lots of memory, a not-quite-bleeding-edge video card, and a fast processor, Vista was great from the getgo.

However, this was not the buying trend of most PC makers. Their trend was to push people to ever-cheaper machines. Sadly, at the time Vista came out as well, all but the most expensive laptops were dodgy for Vista in all its glory.

This is a matter of zigging when you should have zagged, for the most part. But there were two other trends that caught Microsoft by surprise.

The first trend was virtualization. Vista was virtualization-surly. One of its cool features that’s great if you’re on a high-end computer is that it did a lot of pre-caching and pre-loading. Most people with lots of memory on a computer just don’t use that memory, and Vista had ways to use it to make the experience snappier. If you’re on a VM, this is precisely what you don’t want. In an ironically saving grace, though, Vista had a virtualization-surly license, as well. Only the most expensive Vista package was licensed for VMs, which was just as well given that it was optimized for big tower computers in a way that it was pessimized for VMs.

The second trend was netbooks. Intel gave not in the form of faster CPUs, but lighter, smaller, cheaper, less power-hungry CPUs in the Atom. The Atom, however, didn’t have the oomph for Vista, and this meant it had to run XP, which further tarnished Vista’s rep.

All of this together — bad performance among gamers, bad performance on cheap computers and laptops, combined with the trends towards virtualization and netbooks were what gave Vista a bad rep. The people who bought a computer that was a high-end desktop but not a gaming machine loved Vista (and love it to this day). Unfortunately, this demographic is precisely the demographic that also tends to buy Macs. Vista’s problems were all from zigging when you should have zagged.

Some of Vista’s problems can be laid at the feet of “security” (which I intentionally put in scare quotes. UAC was rightly ridiculed for excessive dialogs, but is that a security failure or a UI failure? Yes, kernel improvements delayed getting drivers out (which is one of the things that made the gaming experience suboptimal) and some other bumps. But those were compounded by marketing that went opposite of reality. If the Vista marketing had said, “Hey, it’s going to be a bit slow, and there will be some rough edges. But you’ll really like how we’re sticking it to virus writers” then there may have been a different perception. It is also not fair to blame counter-factual marketing on security.

The bottom line is this. Vista was great for some people. It was bad for others. But the marketing said it was going to be great for everyone. Good marketing that took Vista’s plusses and minuses as facts could have made things better. It was bad timing that Vista came out when the prevailing trend of every-faster computers everywhere started to change. Facing that could have made the difference.

None of that has anything to do with security.

Happy Emancipation Proclamation Day!

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That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States [including the military and naval authority thereof] will, during the continuance in office of the present incumbents, recognize [and maintain the freedom of] such persons, as being free, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a good article on the Emancipation Proclamation.

[Quick update: Bryan Carter has a great photo he mentioned in the comments.]

Caster Semenya, Alan Turing and “ID Management” products

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caster-semenya-cover-girl.jpgSouth African runner Caster Semenya won the womens 800-meter, and the attention raised questions about her gender. Most of us tend to think of gender as pretty simple. You’re male or you’re female, and that’s all there is to it. The issue is black and white, if you’ll excuse the irony.

There are reports that:

Two Australian newspapers reported Friday that gender tests show the world champion athlete has no ovaries or uterus and internal testes that produce large amounts of testosterone. … Semenya is hardly alone. Estimates vary, but about 1 percent of people are born with abnormal sex organs, experts say. These people may have the physical characteristics of both genders or a chromosomal disorder or simply ambiguous features. (“When someone is raised female and the genes say XY,” AP)

For more on the medical end of this, see for example the “Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders” in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The athletics associations rules don’t cover all of these situations well. The real world is far messier and more complex than most people have cause to address. There are a great many apparently simple things that are really complicated as you dig in.

What the sports associations and news media are doing to Semenya is reprehensible. (There are over 10,000 stories listed on Google News, versus 13,000 for Derek Jeter, who just broke a Yankees record.) She didn’t come into running knowing that she had no ovaries. Having to deal with the identity issues that her testing brings up under the harsh light of the entire world (including me) is simply unfair.

It’s unfair in almost the same way as the British government’s treatment of Alan Turing, the mathematician who Time named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his fundamental work on computers and cryptanalysis. Turing was also a convicted homosexual who committed suicide because of his “treatment” with estrogen, which caused him to become impotent and to develop breasts.

This week, Gordon Brown issued an apology entitled “Treatment of Alan Turing was ‘appalling’:”

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

Sports officialdom and state governments are different. Sports are voluntary associations, although athletes have little influence on the choices of international sports functionaries. Either way, watching the chaotic world crash onto the inflexible bureaucracies is tremendously frustrating to me.

As more and more of the world is processed by Turing Machines, assumptions that seem obvious to the programmer are exposed harshly at the edges. A friend with a Juris Doctorate recently applied for a job online. The form had a field “year you graduated from high school” that had to be filled out before she went on. Trouble is, she never did quite finish high school. She had the really relevant qualification-a J.D. from a good school. But she had an emotionally wrenching choice of lying on the form or not applying for the job. She eventually chose to lie, and sent a note to the HR people saying she’d done so and explaining why. I doubt the fellow who wrote that code ever heard about it.

I have a challenge to anyone involved in creating an online identity management system: How well does your system handle Semenya?

The typical answer is either that “that’s configurable, although we don’t know if anyone’s done exactly that” or “she’s an edge case, and we deal with the 95% case really well.” If you have a better answer, I’d really like to know about it. And as a product guy, those are likely the decisions I’d make to ship.

I’ll close by echoing Brown’s words: We’re sorry, you deserve so much better.

Rebuilding the internet?

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Once apon a time, I was uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam. Oh, harvard was probably enough, it was a pretty well known host in the uucp network which carried our email before snmp. I was also harvard!bwnmr4!postmaster which meant that at the end of an era, I moved the lab from copied hosts files to dns, when I became adam@bwnmr4.harvard…wow, there’s still cname for that host. But I digress.


Really, I wanted to talk about a report, passed on by Steven Johnson and Gunnar Peterson, that Vint Cerf said that if he were re-designing the internet, he’d add more authentication.

And really, while I respect Vint a tremendous amount, I’m forced to wonder: Whatchyou talkin’ about Vint?


I hate going off based on a report on Twitter, but I don’t know what the heck a guy that smart could have meant. I mean, he knows that back in the day, people like me could and did give internet accounts to (1) anyone our boss said to and (2) anyone else who wanted them some of this internet stuff and wouldn’t get us in too much trouble. (Hi S! Hi C!) So when he says “more authentication” does that mean inserting “uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam” in an IP header? Ensuring your fingerd was patched after Mr. Morris played his little stunt?


But more to the point, authentication is a cost. Setting up and managing authentication information isn’t easy, and even if it were, it certainly isn’t free. Even more expensive than managing the authentication information would be figuring out how to do it. The packet interconnect paper (“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn) was published in 1974, and says “These associations need not involve the transmission of data prior to their formation and indeed two associates need not be able to determine that they are associates until they attempt to communicate.” That was before DES (1975), before Diffie-Hellman (1976), Needham-Schroeder (1978) or RSA. I can’t see how to maintain that principle with the technology available at the time.

When setting up a new technology, low cost of entry was a competitive advantage. Doing authentication well is tremendously expensive. I might go so far as to argue that we don’t know how fantastically expensive it is, because we so rarely do it well.

Not getting hung up in easy problems like prioritization or hard ones like authentication, but simply moving packets was what made the internet work. Allowing new associations to be formed, ad-hoc, made for cheap interconnections.

So I remain confused by what he could have meant.

[Update: Vint was kind enough to respond in the comments that he meant the internet of today.]

Today’s Privacy Loss – English Soldiers’ Details Published

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Demonstrating that no one’s data is safe, the names, pay records, and other personal information of 90,000 English soldiers was placed on the Internet. These soldiers, who served with king Henry V at Agincourt now have their information listed at www.medievalsoldier.org, exposing them to the chance of identity theft after nearly 500 years. They soldiers served from the years 1369-1453. There is no word as to whether they will get credit card protection yet.

Va Pbaterff Nffrzoyrq, Whyl 4 1776

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My usual celebration of Independence day is to post, in its entirety, the Declaration of Independence. It’s very much worth reading, but this year, there’s a little twist, from a delightful story starring Lawren Smithline and Robert Patterson, with a cameo by Thomas Jefferson. Patterson sent Jefferson a letter which read, in part:

“I shall conclude this paper with a specimen of such writing,” he boasted, “which I may safely defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race to decypher to the end of time….”

patterson-enciphered-declaration.jpg

Well, perhaps it didn’t last until the end of time, but the cipher apparently lasted until now, which is pretty darn good.
There’s an article in
Harvard Magazine, and one in American Scientist, but it’s behind a paywall. Finally, the Wall St Journal has an article, which mentions, both without linking to either.

I think what I really like about this story is how a mathematician bothered to send his new ciphertext to the author of Virginia’s statue on religious liberty (as our third President preferred to be remembered). Having just finished Steven Johnson’s very enjoyable “The Invention of Air,” I’m struck by how broadly engaged with science and the useful arts the founders were. I think that sending an encrypted letter to President Obama would get you … well, I don’t really want to think about it, having just read the Declaration.

Citizens, Juries and other Balances

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the farewell kiss you dog.jpgFollowing on my post on Parliaments, Dukes and Queens, I’d like to talk about other checks on the power of government, besides throwing tea into the harbor.

In Britian, “a jury has failed to clear police in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.” The jury is the first group who, frankly, has not whitewashed the death. Investigations by Scotland Yard, The Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Crown Prosecution Service all failed to find any form of punishable fault by the armed police or their leadership.


In New York, a police officer who wrongfully arrested a bike rider and lied about what happened has been indicted, “Officer Is Indicted in Toppling of Cyclist.” Charges have not yet been revealed, but I’m hoping for perjury and assault. The interesting thing about this case, which I’ve followed a little, is what changed everything was video of the incident.

Meanwhile, one of the illegal wiretap (2005 variant) whistleblowers, Thomas Tamm, has come forward. In “The Fed Who Blew the Whistle,” Michael Isikoff writes:

At one point, Tamm says, he approached Lisa Farabee, a senior counsel in OIPR who reviewed his work, and asked her directly, “Do you know what the program is?” According to Tamm, she replied: “Don’t even go there,” and then added, “I assume what they are doing is illegal.” Tamm says his immediate thought was, “I’m a law-enforcement officer and I’m participating in something that is illegal?” A few weeks later Tamm bumped into Mark Bradley, the deputy OIPR counsel, who told him the office had run into trouble with Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the chief judge on the FISA court. Bradley seemed nervous, Tamm says. Kollar-Kotelly had raised objections to the special program wiretaps, and “the A.G.-only cases are being shut down,” Bradley told Tamm. He then added, “This may be [a time] the attorney general gets indicted,” according to Tamm. (Told of Tamm’s account, Justice spokesman Boyd said that Farabee and Bradley “have no comment for your story.”)

By now its obvious that individuals, empowered by technology are increasingly able to act as a counter-balance to some of the power of the state. This is relatively new and still nascent. The ability of random passers-by to video events is only a few decades old. The ability to get stories out there and draw attention to them has increased tremendously with the rise of Usenet, blogs, Facebook, etc. Of course, people have always stood up to the state, but I think the addition of video and networking make it easier and a more interesting balance than it has been.

This, of course, requires citizens to be active, engaged, and united. All the outrage over illegal wiretapping was effectively countered with propaganda alleging that illegal was the only way to wiretap, or that the law was outdated. It also requires the citizenry to be jealous guardians of their precious liberties.

I’ve been going back and forth on this post, in part because Muntazer al-Zaidi was beaten by jailers, and is facing a 7-15 year jail sentence for ‘offending the head of a foreign state.’

In unrelated news, the Obama transition team has done an internal review, which, shockingly, “Finds No ‘Inappropriate’ Contacts With Blagojevich”