Lying by Omission...

[elfs]

Microsoft has released Own Your Space-- Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online, a 230-page book "for teens" teaching them how to be safe and secure in their use of on-line materials.

There's a very large section on malware, on how to protect yourself from viruses, trojans, and so forth and so on. What's fascinating about the book is the extent to which Microsoft's writers have eschewed any responsibility for making the host so damn infectious in the first place.

There is no mention of the MacOS or Linux OS at all throughout the book, no mention of their relative invulnerability and from-the-kernel-up security models, no mention of their own incomparably promiscuous and vulnerable operating systems and how those contributed to the general sense of Internet-borne threats to man and machine alike.

Buy a Mac. Run Thunderbird. Install Askimet. And you can skip chapters 1-5 entirely.

Chapters 6-16 are pretty good, though, but they're about the social dangers: cyberbullying, stalking, being too public with some things. On the other hand, chapter 12 is absolutely aghast that you might adopt anything other than a commercial licensing option for your own creative efforts.

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

But Microsoft has No Responsibility moral or otherwise to recommend other OSen to users. Even on a core level, this isn't lying, it's pragmatism. By far the substantial majority of personal computers out there are running Windows, and most teens won't actually have substantial say in what OS the machine they use/own runs; it's in the best interests to offer them advice for the system they're likely to use.

[lovingboth]

Most harm-reduction programmes in the drugs field say something like 'you'd be safer if you weren't injecting, but if you are then...'

The equivalent here would be to admit that 'you'd be safer if you were running Linux or OS X, but if you are running Windows then...'