What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2009

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There are some clues in the first snippet above.

"customers wanted" client-sewer computing. The PHBs wanted the power to manipulate the data. And they wanted it to be easy.

Which as a consequence, makes it, by design, insecure.

It's possible to throw together PC-type hardware to build "terminals" that have an attractive GUI but which execute no application code at all. Nor do they store any data beyond the content of a network boot ROM.

Communications from the server are only UI traffic; which can be encrypted over the network. Network hardware can also "firewall" communications to prevent such networked machines bypbutting secured servers if they have loaded other code.

In the end, the weakest part of the security chain is the network connection. A send person can boot the terminal from their own computing device, loading their own code. That code can initally emulate the boot ROM of the terminal, but filter the downloaded code in order to conceal the installation. A serious hacking exercise but not impossible.

There's always a tendency of feeping creaturism. Users will want some sort of portable computing to subsequently connect to the office network; wired or wireless.

Businesses need to carefully consider what data they allow to be loaded and how it may be loaded (or downloaded!). They of course can't fulfill that need because they have nobody with an adequate understanding of information security and business consequences. They are at the mercy of IT conslutants.

It's easy to bypbutt cook-book "security processes".

e.g. at one customer, I was asked if I had a mobile phone with camera *. I informed the receptionist that other customers would be calling the number and would be unable to work without the phone. Turned around and started walking towards the door.

"Oh... if you're on call, you can keep the phone."

* Perhaps because they think that a grainy photograph of the things that they're making would be more useful than the CAD drawings one could slurp from the several unprotected CAD workstations, machine tools and servers with the laptop I was carrying. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign Economist E*con"o*mist-, n. X against HTML mail One with a ready explanation as to why and postings his last prediction was so wrong