Now for advice on finding the most crookproof computers and programs.
Buy a micro with 16- or 32-bit word lengths and RAMs of 256K or more. Those specifications will let you use more elaborate codes to protect information. What’s more, they might be less cumbersome than codes on an 8-bit machine. Look, too, for electronic design that lets your computer establish privilege levels—reachable through passwords. That way, Sally, the new secretary, can start out getting into the computer only for word processing. Helen, the payroll clerk, can have access to confidential salary information but not a top-secret budget that doesn’t give her the raise she’s been pestering you about. Questions exist about the effectiveness of passwords and codes, at least when the thieves or snoops may be sophisticated, but that’s another story. Most experts will tell you that anything that can be coded can be cracked. The trick is to make it not worth the criminals’ time and resources. Of course, the best safeguard is still the simplest: locking up the disks and computer after you or your people are through.
New minis, by the time you’re reading this, may all be 64 bit or higher. They adapt to codes—and fancy electronic logs showing the kind of work done on them—more easily than do micros. And they might justify other costly security measures. Suppose, for instance, you want to follow the many government agencies’ examples and pen in the tiny radio waves that computers emit so that eavesdroppers can’t pick them up with sensitive receivers. A micro fortified this way might cost perhaps $10,000. “What’s the sense of doing that for what’s essentially a throwaway computer?” asks Harold Joseph Highland. The “throwaway,” be assured, is an exaggeration, but his point comes through.
Of course, don’t forget the disadvantages of minis.
Most machines at the mini level or above need professional programmers, and that’s bad news if you’re trying to stay in complete charge of your business.
Also, minis, because of their expense, normally won’t pay for themselves unless they have at least several terminals.
And the more terminals you have, the more “doors” through which crooks can “walk.”
Still, you normally shouldn’t let security alone determine if you end up with a micro or with a mini. Remember the warning earlier in this chapter that security costs shouldn’t overwhelm you. How often, for instance, is your information so sensitive that you’re worried about criminals lurking in the bushes with the elaborate equipment needed to make sense of the tiny waves your computer emits? Your data might not even justify use of codes.
I myself haven’t the slightest need for codes, user-privilege levels, anything other than locking up my disks, since I’m essentially a small businessman who is the sole operator of a micro.
Even the FBI doesn’t really worry about security on some computers. At the time I visited the agency’s academy in Virginia, several little Radio Shack models were purring away there—the same kind you’d buy off the shelf. The micros’ software had passwords, but some agents could bypass them, anyway, which wouldn’t be necessary, of course, since, in this case, the FBI wants the machines to be used.