Abstract
Back in the days of Windows 98 and Windows XP, Microsoft’s desktop operating system had a reputation of being insecure and highly vulnerable to attack, and in fairness, this reputation was well deserved. Being designed in the days before pervasive Internet access, Microsoft didn’t (or perhaps didn’t have to) concentrate on much more than a PC being a stand-alone machine connected to nothing more than the office network.
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Notes
- 1.
In the comedy science-fiction book, Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (Pan Macmillan, 1982), an SEP field is described as “something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem … The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”
The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it’s simpler just to take the thing away and do without it. The “Somebody Else’s Problem field” is much simpler, more effective, and “can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery”.
This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.
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© 2015 Mike Halsey
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Halsey, M. (2015). Keeping You, Your Files, and Your Computer Safe. In: Beginning Windows 10. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1085-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1085-7_11
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-1086-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-1085-7
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