For a respected tech geek, you are so 1999!

[elfs]

Another one of those "tear my hair out" stories on the radio. NPR's Michelle Norris was talking to Brian Cooley, the "editor at large" of CNET.com. The first thing that made me feel all retro was, when asked what steps Apple was taking to secure the iCloud platform, Cooley responded:

We don't really know because that's the first step in good security is not to tell the world what you're doing. But we can assume that Apple being one of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world has thrown massive resources at this.

AAAARGGGHHH! No, that's bullshit. All that means is that Apple's customers don't know if they have to take any action to protect themselves. The correct route to security is to tell absolutely everybody what you intend to do, in excrutiating detail, with honeypots and demonstration servers, and let the world beat the bugs out of it. The strongest security in the world, the public key infrastructure, the same one used by banks and militaries and national security interests, is based on source code absolutely everybody knows and that the public has source level access to.

The other stupid thing he said was:

The first step in good Cloud security is to have a hard to figure out password that you change regularly, every six months at least.

"Hard to figure out" is not the same thing as a "hard" password. Want your password to be secure? Make sure it's at least 12 characters long, sixteen if you can stand it. Make sure they're not subject to a dictionary attack by using odd characters.

Man, this guy's advice is out-of-date. Everyone who listens to him will be ill-informed about what really needs to happen.

In the same article, Symantec System's Gerry Egan and McAfee's Joris Evers both encourage reporter Nina Gregory to give her listeners this advice: always have anti-virus software installed. Far be it for me to suggest that people who sell anti-virus software have something to be gained from a virus-laden cyber-ecology, but why is it nobody ever mentions that the biggest threat to Internet security is the inherent insecurity of its most popular operating system, Microsoft Windows?

Apple products outstripped Windows in the home consumer market a few years ago, but the multi-tiered security of Apple's operating system makes it much harder for viruses to get a foothold, and the number of viruses exploiting Macs is orders of magintude smaller than that of Windows. The same is true of computers running more obscure operating systems, like Linux.

The best anti-virus software for ordinary consumers is Mac OS X. Or, if you can't afford the top-of-the-line, a used PC laptop and Ubuntu.