Double-Clicks

The reason the security gurus of the world won't tell you the truth is that if they did, they'd be out of business tomorrow.

Microsoft Windows is good business - for everyone. The most overpriced operating system ever, it can come with support costs that are equally outrageous, and it demands a never-ending stream of add-ons that only redden the bottom line more.

Companies such as McAfee and Symantec, big on the anti-virus side, and others such as CheckPoint, Kerio, and Zone Labs on the firewall side, all understand you'd be better off abandoning Windows, but they're not about to lay the cards on the table and explain it to you. Without Windows, they're all out of a job.

Speculating in migrating present technologies to Unix-based platforms is moot: Unix systems don't need them today, and no other operating system needs the kind of service and protection Windows does. Unix systems by their very nature are more secure, and anti-virus and firewall cottage businesses would wait months to get a single customer.

Windows is an open architecture in the sense that nothing is sacred. Programs - and intruders - can put anything anywhere on your disk. Keystroke loggers regularly steal credit card numbers and passwords. Skiddies take over web cams, spy on people in their private homes, and start issuing scary WinPopup messages to their clueless victims.

The costs are great too: recovering a network from an onslaught of SoBig or MyDoom is painful lesson in Microsoft folly, with all the hair-pulling concomitant with trying to wall up such an inherently insecure system.

The victims - the end users and corporations - don't do particularly good accounting. They don't look beyond the tips of their noses, only at the immediate crisis, think how they can weather things again, and don't want to consider long-term solutions that give them a better bottom line and restored peace of mind. And in so doing, they are fools.

All the while the @stakes, the Symantecs, and the McAfees continue to nag about expensive anti-virus list updates, the Kerios and Zone Labs coerce you to pay exorbitant yearly fees - and withhold the not so well kept secret that if you weren't using Windows, you wouldn't need them at all.

And they're so ill-equipped to handle your possible migration to a saner platform that their technologies only work on the platform you're presently on. They've bet the farm you won't get a clue.

Prove them wrong: they deserve it. They've never been honest with you, so you don't owe them a thing. Migrate away from Windows and put them out of business.