This is humorous and just shows how out of touch people in our government or running for it are with the real world:

A public interest lawyer who is also intending to run as a Republican in the 2006 Illinois gubernatorial race is taking his fight to Microsoft in hopes of preventing the company from releasing what he calls "bad code."

Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing Windows Vista. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities.

The full story is here:

http://www.betanews.com/article/AntiMS_Group_Aims_to_Block_Vista/1123614377

The sad part is that this sort of thing probably sells well to the general public. After all, who wouldn’t want to see perfect, bug free software even if mandated by the government. Never mind that such a thing doesn’t exist and while Microsoft certainly does have a fairly poor record for dealing with bugs and security until recently (when it’s essentially too late to fix…), the alternative of going back to simple stone age software that is non-functional also is not an option.

As software developers we all know how hard it is to build bug free software for anything but the simplest systems. The task of creating a bug free operating system is practically an impossible task. All the Windows alternatives are no less vulnerable, albeit much less targeted than Windows which runs on well over 90% of consumer machines.

The solution to this problem isn’t sanctions but incremental improvements of the process and building in better security into the operating system. A lot of Vista looks like it will much of the same as Windows XP, which likely means we won’t get away from vulnerabilities and software updates anytime soon. But Vista also promises (I haven’t looked at it yet) to provide a much more locked down and secure experience with better isolation, tighter default security and easier security configuration. While not perfect I would say this is easily the right direction to be moving in – there will always be vulnerabilities that haven’t been thought of yet with technology that may not even exist today. There’s no way to build a perfect castle unless you disconnect and isolate into a island and never install anything. Better yet don’t turn on the computer at all <g>

The vast majority of security issues are self-inflicted anyway: People downloading software without regard where it comes from and installing full trust applications. Above all – much as that sounds self-serving – user education is important. The threat of malware will never go away as long as users have the ability to download and install software locally and execute code that has system wide access which is true of just about all major operating systems today.

Ultimately it would be nice if every application could run in an isolated copy of the operating system in a VPC like environment. The app can do whatever it wants in this isolated VPC without affecting the master OS shell. Even better if you could take a snapshot and save it and then rollback to a previous state. Alas, the hardware’s not quite there to make this a reality but I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this in a future OS version.

Anyway, the comment from the would-be government official never fails to illustrate the incredible ignorance of people who run for public office. Anything to make some noise. If you’re in Illinois, make sure you don’t vote for a pie in the sky idiot like this. I find it even more amusing that this is a Republican – the pro-business party – trying to impose government sanctions against a public company…