Ok, the security post, and what happened…

Remember that post to my blog a few months back. The one about ‘The End to Computer Viruses’. Well, I sent that link to a bunch of people. Some of the ‘technorati’ and press types that get cited on the net a lot.

What did I learn:

1. I am not a writer. I actually spent a lot of time trying to get that article written. The hard part is talking about something very technical to a medium or low tech crowd. The result was a mess. For the technical people it was like “hey, you didn’t explain X, Y, or Z”. For the non-technical it was, “what are you talking about??” I couldn’t hook either crowd.

2. People like that don’t read their email. Seriously. Some of them responded weeks later.

3. Some of them are a bit snotty. I emailed Larry Osterman. He basically replied with ‘you are just copying Paladium’. He then /dev/nulled any attempt at a discussion about this. Now, when I used to read his blog, I thought. “Hey, neat. That guy was at Microsoft for 20 years. Those are some neat stories.” Now, I read further with: ‘hey, this guy worked on some of those clunky designs that everybody hated. (SMB/CIFS, Exchange 2000).’ Maybe they don’t allow rational discourse at Microsoft? Whatever.

4. Some people actually cross linked the entry and mentioned it, but if you aren’t in that top 1%, you get very little traffic.

5. Kuroshin is filled with zealots (probably more than /.) I felt like their community review process went to the lowest common denominator. Lots of name calling and abuse. (Nothing has changed since the ole BBS days)

6. The internet will let you get the word out, only if you can get your message broadcast on one of the trusted channels. I wrote the article and put it on my own domain. rather than use O’Reilly or some other publication. The traffic was zilch. My other articles on O’Reilly really generated some traffic.

Now, if I had written the article better, maybe a lot of these problems would go away. Then again maybe not. If you look at the way the computer industry moves, you can see that there is a lack of innovation. I wanted to really give the OS community a little shock from the cattle prod.

Recently, however, I learned that the Qualcomm BREW platform is a great example of a signed code environment. They have 40 million handsets with this stuff. Then end result: they are profitable, have no viruses/spyware on the phones, and there support costs are lower.

When people make money on something, they figure it out. All of the established players are already moving towards this. You’ll just have to take what the OS guys give when it’s ready rather than now.

Overall, a good experience… I learned something.