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Reading Between the Lines of
Code
by Doug Chick
 For sometime now companies like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have been supporting the dummy terminal concept for personal computers with little or no support from the public, especially from the computer professional. The idea is a sound one; you boot up your computer and make a connection across the Internet to your main provider and all of your software programs are executed through your browser or whatever front end is made available. This will allow the big brother software companies to controller software pirating and they can release any version they want with no resistance. After all gold has the least amount of resistance to a current. That's a joke. If you don't get it I than it probably isn't as funny as I think.
The leading cause of this resistance lies in trust? It is no secret that software companies are in the business to make money, despite their future and humanitarian concerns. Even with the best intentions, these companies have board members and stockholders to answer to and every quarter they better have something impressive to show for their efforts. Knowing this, there remains little room for consumer trust to blindly delegate control of your personal data, e-mail and any other bit of info about you to the same people (Software and Telco companies) that are standing in a rotating line at the federal court house. Who knows, being properly cataloged may mean less spam that is better suited to your particular interest. Still, would this be better for you? Yes, it probably would be. Your software terminal provider could control viruses, data lose and someone hacking into your system and hacking viruses. A police state can also offer this same type of protection but I don't think we want that either. At least I don't think we do. It's becoming less clear these days.
I wonder sometimes if all of the hardware crashes, viruses and hackers or viruses that hack are created only to shake the consumers confidence so that they will see that we are much better off letting big brother protect us. A lot like what the government is doing over terrorism. Paranoid I agree, but I'm kind of a nut anyways. And after all you're here reading this, right? Uh-huh.
Unless one of the 7 special interest group bills inside the Homeland Security bill has given software vendors dominion over the protection of your computer, (which at this point I would be too surprise to find out.) no one is going to voluntarily give a software company or government controller over your computer data.
These days it is not enough to be weary of every piece of spam, unsolicited phone call or junk mail that the U.S Post Office delivers; we also have to second-guess news articles, government press releases and opinion polls.
And when the question arises why programs like Linux are so popular the answer is because there is no hidden price tag.
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