What Microsoft proposes to create a safer Internet Environment?
It can be said with great vigor and almost certain unanimity that the Internet community is in dire need of some 
security changes – to curb the menacing amounts of malware and security breaches available online.
Well, fortunately Microsoft has realized this need, and in a recent conference specifically addressed this matter, with ideas on how to combat this very problem.
Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group raised the following ideas regarding Internet usability and safety thereof.
“One idea would be to bring outside administration to consumer PCs. Personal that can administer PCs and exercise authority over them, for instance forbidding users to run certain software and pushing security patches to their PCs.”
Without going into specifics, Charney was simply opening up a point of discussion, to gauge the legitimacy of such a proposal.
Other ideas included utilizing Network Access Protection, “a technology Microsoft calls NAP (Network Access Protection). The idea is that PC cannot connect to the network unless they demonstrate to an authority on the network that they meet certain criteria: for instance, that they have applied a certain level of operating system updates, or that they have antivirus protection and that it’s updated. If they don’t meet these criteria, they are shifted off to a separate network, sometimes called a “walled garden,” in which they can do little more than to mitigate the problems that kept them off the network.”
Charney goes on to propose “demonstrably infected computers, those creating a threat to others, be walled off.”
The draw back rears its head when faced with the prospect of who would be willing to foot the costs of such innovations. Costs incurred could vary from all sorts, especially bearing in mind the reflection that, as is stated by Charney, “ISPs would be overwhelmed with customers requiring hours of support and who would pay for it?”
What Charney suggests as a solution is to make it a matter of public policy.
“Perhaps tax revenues should be used for this purpose. General funds? Some sort of special tax on Internet use?”
Either way fairly good ideas resonating, but even more o a comfort is the thought that at least companies the likes of Microsoft are starting to realize the dire importance of enforcing security measures that actually work, online and around.
