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There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye: " Our email is completely secure. . . ." Why would Bill Gates say that? S
by tinco 10y ago
There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye:
" Our email is completely secure. . . ."
Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don't reckon they were using that.
The movie "Hackers" would come out about a year after that. The cyberpunk genre had been going on a full decade, did Bill really believe no one could read their e-mail? Of course Bill knew about security issues, but was it just not on his mind? Obviously it's not very smart to talk about the sort of thing that is a fundamental threat to business of internet technology to a journalist, but to state outright that it was completely secure seems to be a be going a bit far.
I always wondered why it took so long for Microsoft to develop a proper security story, or even properly developing anything Internet related properly in that time. They could have been twice the company they are now if they took it as serious as this article makes it look Bill took it. Microsoft wasn't anything on the Internet but the company who built your OS and let your mark up your documents for the next ten years after this article.
- jm4 10y agoRead the sentence right before that one where he says no one else reads his email. The implication is that he doesn't have an assistant screening his messages. His email is completely secure in the sense that it's a private one on one conversation, which is to say it's as private as a quiet conversation in a coffee shop or at a park for example. I don't think he is implying it's necessarily secure from hackers and eavesdroppers.
- sandworm101 10y agoOr he was just wrong. Maybe the simplest understanding of his statements is that he simply didn't know of what he spoke. Or maybe he was telling a fib. Either of those two options seem more likely than some convoluted debate as to the common understanding of the word "secure".
- jm4 10y agoWell, you could assume he meant "secure" in the same sense as many of us in the industry would interpret it today and conclude that he is a dimwit. Or you could read the sentence right before which gives the context for the use of the word "secure". Reading into any more than that is pure speculation.
- wtbob 10y ago> Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? He had to rewrite his 1995 book The Road Ahead to cover the Internet better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_book%29#Content_differences_between_hardback_and_trade_editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_b...), so it's entirely possible that he didn't actually know all that much about how email worked in 1994.
- adventured 10y agoThat's extremely unlikely. Microsoft had been using email since the late 1980s and Gates was famous for being deep on technical knowledge. Like most, he didn't expect the Web to take off as quickly as it did - that's a completely different matter from understanding how email works.
- jcrawfordor 10y agoBack when this article was written, plaintext transport across the internet would not be viewed as nearly the kind of security issue it is today. This wasn't just a shortcoming on Microsoft's part, it was a shortcoming on virtually the entire computer industry - which is, yes, why we are in the situation we're in today. Exactly none of the internet was designed to be secure by modern standards, and vulnerabilities that are obvious today were not obvious 20, 10, and even 5 years ago.