Synaptic Sugar

No matter how good hardware is getting year after year, computers are only as good as the operating system they run, which lets users take advantage of the hardware. It is thus only expectable that a prerogative of such users would be to tweak and customize their operating system according to their needs, up to the point of choosing what operating system to buy together with a new computer (or choosing to buy no OS at all). However, it’s not that easy: we all know the vast majority of PCs are sold with an operating system pre-installed (Microsoft Windows), and it’s not always possible (and not in all countries) to decline the license agreement shown on the first use of the operating system and obtain a reimbursement of the price paid for it (don’t forget that even if the computer comes with it, Windows is not free of charge).

It would be quite a lot better if PCs were sold without any operating system at all and the user could always have a choice of buying Windows with them or not. In fact, it wouldn’t change much for those who want Windows, but it would change a lot for those who don’t (take for example software developers, people who want to build their own media centers or home network, and might benefit more from using a flavor of UNIX) as they wouldn’t waste money on something they wouldn’t use. And obviously, it’s primarily a matter of freedom of choice, not merely of money.

Professor Renzo Davoli of the University of Bologna, Italy, has launched a campaign to press for the passing of a law that would facilitate things in such a matter. The proposal, sent to the Minister of Economic Development Pierluigi Bersani, revolves around three main points: when computers are sold, the price for hardware must be listed separately from the price for the operating system license, if any; buyers must be given the choice to buy plain hardware, without any operating system; the prices listed for the operating system license must be realistic and must not depend on private agreements among third parties. There is also an online petition aimed at estimating how many people agree with this idea.

I believe the proposal is noteworthy and meaningful. The key point here is not which operating system is better or which one is more complete, cheaper or more effective. The key point is that different people have very different needs and want different things; hence, everyone must have the right to choose what they pay for. It’s the freedom of choosing and the right of not wasting resources, two principles that most of the times are not being granted.

I love old computer games. I can’t forget the discovery of whole worlds through the creations of some of the greatest minds in the field of gaming: Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, Sid Meyer, Peter Molyneux, Ron Gilbert — just to name a few. It’s a shame most of those games require MS-DOS so you can’t easily play them on modern computers… unless there was some way to virtually go back in time. That’s what emulators do, in a way. They can let you run applications on virtual machines that run on your real machine, emulating the behavior of a different machine that you don’t own. In fact, from the DOSBox website:

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any DOS application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early development.

DOSBox is just one of the many possibilities (see SCUMMVM, Exult, and others — and they’re all Free Software), but it works really well and is available on many operating systems. Now I can again play old games and go back to the past.

According to Tweakers.net, the revolutionary and secure Secustick USB memory stick might not be so revolutionary or secure after all. Commissioned by the French government and used by several European companies and agencies, the Secustick (sold for around 130 Euro for 1 GB of memory) protects the data it holds with a password and promises to “self-destruct” if the password is input incorrectly too many times.

However, the password verification and the unlocking happen on the computer the stick is connected to, rather than directly on the chip, so the whole process can too easily be at the computer’s owner’s (or users’s) disposal. Moreover, the internal components of the stick are unprotected and thus do not offer resistance to tampering (and do not show any hardware dedicated to “self-destruction”). The Tweakers.net article does not explain what happens if the stick is used on a Linux or Mac OS X system (to name two examples), but states that the embedded program that asks the user for a password runs only on Windows.

If the analysis on Tweakers.net is accurate, it does expose important weaknesses in the Secustick; however, they seem to be so easily findable that many malicious users might already have exploited them. For the moment, the manufacturer of Secustick announced that a newer and more secure version of the stick will be available soon.