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Devil's Advocate: It's time for reliable computing
Why do we put up with the dismal state of PC security?

By Martin Brampton

Published: Monday 27 June 2005

The latest computer offerings - media centre and home automation PCs - can sound intriguing at first. But, says Martin Brampton, their appeal soon fades once one realises the cost and risk of using insecure systems for critical data and tasks.

Symantec is running an advertising campaign for its antivirus software based on the fear of losing all your digital photographs. How ever did we get ourselves into such a mess that a simple activity like taking snapshots needs special technology at extra cost to make it secure?

Like most people, I have family photographs going back a century or more. Some of them are a bit faded and others have become dog-eared. But none of them have disappeared because of a malicious technology exploit. The benefits of digital photography are considerable but surely we should have systems that can store our pictures safely.

I have also read all about the idea of the media centre PC or its relative the home automation PC. So far it leaves me pretty cool. For a start, why would I want to spend over a thousand pounds on a device that appears to offer only marginal benefits over existing consumer products for television and audio?

Don't misunderstand. I'm as keen on the latest gadgetry as the next man. Indeed we already have devices that are doubtless computers under the skin, such as the box that receives Freeview digital signals and decodes them. It also has a fixed disk and allows us to pause the TV programme when the phone rings just at a moment of high drama.

The box is capable of displaying a list of all the next week's programmes for all the available channels. To record a programme, it is sufficient to select it with a few clicks of the remote control. It even downloads new versions of its own software through the signal from the television aerial. Yet it cost much less than £200 and, to the best of my knowledge, is not vulnerable to virus attack.

There is regularly mention of storing a music collection on a computer disk. But most of us have spent a good deal of money on digital recordings. If they all went on to a computer disk, I would want to be sure they were proof against virus attack. The only certain way to do that would be to back them all up - and that takes us back to exactly where we started, with a collection of disks.

Home automation seems to be even more a case of a solution desperately seeking a problem. We are offered facilities such as the ability to use the internet to turn on the central heating. This ignores the confusion that is likely to arise in the typical home, where more than one person is involved. It also supposes that we will readily take to having to remember to bother about such mundane tasks.

Moreover, while the humble time-switch works happily day in day out, connecting the central heating to a general purpose computer, itself linked to the internet looks to be technological overkill. It brings us right back to all the problems that Symantec wants us to spend extra money on, still with no guarantee of complete success.

If we are particularly paranoid, we might well wonder whether the gas suppliers would commission hackers to modify home automation machines. They could then turn up the heating and increase gas sales at a stroke. Or maybe burglars would collaborate with hackers to find out home automation settings that suggested an unoccupied house.

So much of the problem seems to come back to selling an already compromised, general-purpose computer system into a broad range of problem areas. Isn't it time technology providers offered us exciting yet reliable solutions?