This is the opening salvo in a "Safer Surfing" mini-series of articles and as such it contains largely background information rather than practical advice. Keep checking the "Safe Computing" link in the advice menu for subsequent articles.

We are not anti-Microsoft but I'd like to present a picture that properly frames their importance (in both the good and bad senses of the word). It is hard to discuss computing today or the history of desktop computing since 1976 without putting Microsoft into the middle of the story. I actually like Microsoft and think that Bill Gates is probably the greatest business man of my generation. Microsoft played hard and rough and never let up. However, over the last decade things have changed so drastically that Microsoft has become a sort of latter-day IBM. More stodgy than before and with its flaws more exposed than ever. No longer is it the shark swimming forward. Along with IBM, Microsoft is now a dead shark bobbing around like bloated bait.

Weinberg's Law (attributed to the noted author and software consultant Jerry Weinberg) postulates that if builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation. Since the first computer virus was discovered in 1981, malicious hackers have tried to be that woodpecker, sending out emails and messages containing hidden code that can cripple your machine. Over the last two and a half decades, the hackers' methods have spread to con artists, thieves, terrorists, and organised crime. Cyber-criminals can specifically target businesses to commit fraud, steal intellectual property, and extort money by menace. As a home user you are not only open to these attacks but your PC is likely to be harnessed by hackers in their attacks on businesses. The Internet can be as lawless as Deadwood in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory in the 1870's.

Microsoft is like the largest saloon-keeper in Deadwood who takes advantage of the lawlessness to maintain an iron grip on the town. Rather than use its dominance to make Internet communications safer for everyone, the company designs its software products, for example Outlook and Exchange, to lock people into using its other software products and to continue paying for updates and security packs, under the pretext of offering a safer computing environment. Microsoft will soon offer its own protection racket to keep you safe from its own software. At the end of May last year, the company started selling an anti-virus subscription service in the USA called OneCare. Over the next twelve months they will extend sales world wide. Why would Microsoft do this? Because keeping your PC secure promises to be a profitable business at your expense. Industry analysts have said that businesses may be hard-pressed to buy security products from Microsoft -- maker of the software that needs protection. On the consumer front, however, Microsoft brings a well-established and largely trusted brand into the market, these analysts have added.

Standards do exist to help keep email safer, and many email programs adhere to these standards. The problem is Microsoft "improved" and extended those standards and integrated Outlook with Office to entice its captive customer base into using other Microsoft applications - all at the expense of security.

In classic Orwellian doublespeak, Bill Gates last year spun the lawlessness of the Internet into a positive view of Microsoft:¹ "The threats of cybercrime, viruses, and malware have sparked a new wave of innovation that's helping to make the computing ecosystem more secure."

Read that again. He's almost an echo of that Deadwood saloon-keeper, pointing to the violence in the street and inviting you to come into the relative safety of his saloon for a civilised drink -- and to join his protection racket. It is to the credit of Gates' public relations team that Microsoft has somehow escaped blame for this mess, because nearly all of the security problems of recent years have been Windows-specific, as hackers take advantage of loopholes in Microsoft products.

Microsoft Windows is clearly more vulnerable to virus and worm attacks than any other system. "If you use a Windows personal computer to access the Internet, your personal files, your privacy, and your security are all in jeopardy," wrote Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal.² Microsoft has made PC attacks too easy, according to Mossberg, by carelessly opening numerous security holes in the operating system and its web browser. Outlook and Outlook Express work with Micosoft's browser to display HTML-formatted email, which is just one of the many departures from email standards that has helped to de-stabilise email security.

Microsoft's email programs, Outlook and Outlook Express, make your PC even more insecure than Windows by itself. If you have to use Windows, you can at least make your PC somewhat more secure by eschewing Microsoft's applications, including Office, Outlook, and Outlook Express.

There are plenty of free email alternatives that are not as vulnerable to virulent vermin of the digital kind. You need diversity and innovation, not an eternally hazardous computing environment. "In biology, if the members of a herd are too genetically similar, a single disease can wipe them out," wrote Charles Arthur in The Independent³ "Ditto with computer systems: as Microsoft becomes increasingly dominant, the users of its programs are open to weaknesses they may not know exist -- until it is too late."

¹ Gates, Bill. "Viewpoint." BusinessWeek. March 22, 2005

² Mossberg, Walter S. "How to Protect Yourself From Vandals, Viruses If You Use Windows." Personal Technology column. The Wall Street Journal. September 16, 2004.

³Arthur, Charles. "Microsoft's browser dominance at risk as experts warn of security holes." The Independent, July 5, 2004. See http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article45877.ece