Posted 8:38 AM

Microsoft to become traffic cop?

Ellen Messmer reports in Network World that its Bill Gates' intention for Microsoft to make its software 'behave'. Or, more precisely, to reign in activity that the OS considers to be "problematic" as a way to improve security. Gates sited an example: "For example, the Blaster worm caused the RPC service to open a back door and download some malicious code on the machine. In this case, behavior blocking would recognize that this behavior is out of the ordinary for the RPC service and block it." This raises two questions -
1) suppose I want the RPC service to download some code? What happens then?
2) if RPC should never download code, then shouldn't Microsoft simply take out that functionality?

This looks like another half-baked idea from Redmond, like last week's "caller ID plan".