Let me tell you a Christmas story.
Or, rather a Christma story, because this is from the days when computer file names
were limited to eight characters.
It's December 1987.
Ronald Reagan was US President; Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister.
And home computers were sort of a thing, just,
although for the few people that had them they weren't really connected up to any other
machines.
We were still two years away from the World Wide Web even being invented.
And in a small university in Germany,
a student was writing one of the first major computer worms.
It was called "CHRISTMA".
Simple program, it only ran on one type of old, text- well,
now-old, text-based computer.
Back then, it was state of the art.
It just displayed a little text art of a Christmas tree.
But while the user was looking at that,
it ran through the 1987 equivalent of their computer's address book and emailed itself
to everyone in it.
"Let this exec run," it said -- exec being executable file,
a program you start -- "and enjoy yourself".
Well, by modern standards of ransomware and identity theft,
that is a pretty innocent virus,
although it replicated so well and convinced so many people to open it
that it took down one of IBM's networks for a couple of days
-- and that was back when IBM was still a force to be reckoned with.
Actually, it took it down twice,
it resurfaced three years later when, presumably,
someone forgot what it was while they were rooting through their files and opened --
"ah, there's that lovely little Christmas card again".
Which brings us to a question.
That kind of attack is still sort of possible now, on modern hardware.
Not the same program, but that's how a lot of malware still spreads:
you convince the user to download something and run it,
and it gets access to everything on the user's PC --
internet access, webcam, personal documents, everything.
Email isn't not a good vector for spreading stuff like that any more,
but web sites offering pirated stuff do the job just as well.
And yes, there are other routes,
there are zero-day attacks on Flash -- actually,
a lot of zero-day attacks on Flash, actually,
it's pretty much all zero-day attacks on Flash right now.
Zero-day meaning there is no warning given,
zero days from the exploit going out and infecting people,
and Adobe trying to patch Flash, again --
anyway, there are other routes.
But ultimately, if you tell a user, hey,
free music, free pirated software,
free Christmas wallpaper for your PC, whatever you want,
you get them to download something and run it -- and it is game over.
And there are some mitigations these days.
Windows has User Account Control and built-in antivirus,
and Mac and Linux have administrator accounts and permission management,
but if the malware is trying to do something to the important parts of the system,
it'll get stopped, as long as the user doesn't just click the OK box
or type in their password, and let's be honest,
that happens more often than it should.
But even without getting that permission,
even if the virus that you've downloaded is just able to use your user account and your
files:
it can still do a lot of damage,
it can still encrypt all the files in your personal directory,
all your photos and your business invoices,
and lock them away until you send Bitcoin to some anonymous person far away.
To the computer that's naively running a program,
there is no difference between a virus doing damage,
and the user deliberately running something to take those same actions.
You can't create a filter for malicious behaviour like that
without having a near-perfect model of what the user's thinking
and what they might actually want to do.
There are times when, genuinely,
you want to delete everything on your computer.
There is another option, though.
And we use it all the time.
On an iPhone, for example, each app has its own separate area for storing documents.
There's not one central space that all apps can access at the same time.
Imagine if desktop computers were built that way:
all the reports or homework that you've written in Microsoft Word
are only accessible under Microsoft Word, locked down.
And if you want to email a report to someone,
or convert it to a different program,
you don't go -- if you want to attach the file to an email program,
you don't go to the email program,
click "Attach" and run through your central Documents store -- you open Word,
and you tell it to push that one file to the email program.
All your music would be accessible only in the player you downloaded it in,
until you pushed it to somewhere else.
And right now, all the techie people watching this, all of you,
you're out there and you're going,
"oh that'd be terrible, that's an awful thing,
it'd mean we wouldn't be free to use our computers the way we want,
how am I supposed to chain these three different programs together
to do this obscure thing that I need to do?"
And I get that.
I really do.
I enthusiastically endorse that kind of bodging.
And for anyone who's delving deep into their system, who knows their way around,
that kind of advanced mode is necessary.
But why didn't we build those systems,
the ones for non-techies, differently?
Because we never had the chance.
The desktop computers that we have today are descendants of those old systems from 1987.
There wasn't the storage space or processing time back then to try and give every application
its own little silo and manage it separately -- besides,
in a lot of cases the programs were just writing ones and zeros.
Computers were for academic use, for professionals,
so it was Proper Expensive Equipment that had to be treated with care.
But for today's regular user, for the people who get hit by ransomware
and who do lose all their family photos: I'm not sure that system works.
Do regular computer users really need to see the "C drive" or "Macintosh HD"?
Should they need to worry about folders and files and backups?
We've got that design because of backwards compatibility,
because for desktop computers we've never been able to have a clean break.
Even Apple, who said that their users move with the times,
they give a couple of years of grace to stay updated -- and, hell,
Windows will still happily most programs from literally twenty years ago.
There's never been the option to start fresh.
If they ever stopped using that metaphor of folders and files all in one central location
-- and it's been promised, from time to time --
all those old programs will stop working.
But for all-new devices that we've only had for the last few years?
For tablets, and phones, and Chromebooks,
with their locked-down operating systems? Behind the scenes, sure,
they still use that folders and files system,
but it's not visible to the end user.
As those devices become more and more popular,
and the PC's market share starts to decline, at least for home use:
perhaps we will finally be able to leave that old system behind,
and computer security will get a little bit better.
Except.
One of the reasons that Britain has such a strong tech industry now
is the home computer boom of the 1980s,
when the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum made a generation who could code.
We're seeing governments push and push to make sure that kids are computer literate,
that they know that they can write the future as well as read it.
And as much as locking down computers and systems might makes the world more secure:
you can't write iPhone apps on an iPhone.
And someone has to write the iPhone apps.
So whether you're hoping for a new laptop with its files and folders,
or a new phone with its separate data silos,
or maybe something a little less technological under your tree:
merry Christmas to you.
And whether it's digital or physical,
whether you're writing code, or painting art,
or just building a snowman:
here's to whatever you're making next,
and I'll see you in 2016.
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