I just finished reading an executive e-mail that Bill Gates sent to some people that signed for some MS service. I got it from a friend, who recieves this letters.
The paper is about Trustworthy Computing and is cleary directed to MS-fans and people who use MS software. The letter is from 18.july, but I didn't see no comments about it.
At first sight, looks like a simple letter talking about trust over the net. It goes on and on about how services should improve to provide more reliability, how the net should improve its services to avoid virus to spread so easily and things like that.
I agree with the fact that net service should (and will, I presume) improve. Has been like that so far. Services will always be improving, as long as people continue to work on it (which is the great moto behind OS).
The point is the solutions he offers to this matter. First he advices MS user to always keep their machines up to date with MS products. Not just the bug fixes, but with the new releases. He uses this new virus "Flehem" spree to justify it. According to MS, the new Outlook was able to filter this treat, but only systems with the most recent version of Outlook avoid the virus.
And worst than that, he says in his essay that, to improve trustwothy computing, MS is working with some other companies to improve the Internet Protocols. This is shifting standards. One may say that this is not news, and I would agree. The problem is that MS is trying to convince his costumers that their standard is better than the open standard. And this may mean trouble to free software/open source advocates.
This may be happen for a while, but I just got this thing now and I pretty much don't like the sound of this.