[Cryptography] Keeping Malware from Using Security Hardware

[Kent Borg]

On 3/6/25 5:42 AM, Wendy M. Grossman wrote:
> Some years back, when Don Norman began complaining that Apple design 
> was degrading,

I used to be a rabid Apple fan. I was sold instantly when I saw the 
Macintosh.


The sequence I observed, as it happened (because I am old):

- The original Macintosh was *really* well thought out. People scoffed 
that a mouse isn't for power users, but it was very good so real people 
liked it.

- Microsoft copied the Mac, belatedly but then expeditiously, shall we 
say. Not as good as the original. And ugly.

- Most people used Microsoft so kids used Microsoft and learned from that.

- Those kids grew up and with what they had learned, some of them got 
jobs at Apple…


So Apple does a pretty reskining, of a bad MS copy, of a genius Apple 
original, with plenty lost in translation along the way. Sort of.


Apple wrote down the magic of how their interface worked! I have two 
versions of the Apple User Interface Guidelines book, but I bet today 
virtually no one at Apple has even heard of them, let alone read them.


> I think a lot of people thought he was just sour because he wasn't 
> being consulted any more.

That could be true, too.


> But he was and is right about...well, I don't use Apple products, but 
> technology design in general. It has increasingly little to do with 
> what people actually want.

Careful. People don't know what they want, not when it comes to 
innovations they don't know. Some deep thinking visionaries are what is 
needed, in this case it was a few at Xerox Parc, and then a few more 
really good folk working on the original Mac (who I don't think were 
ever at Parc).


Applicability to cryptography, or at least computer security: Bad UIs 
confuse users, confused users make mistakes with bad security 
consequences, and are easier to trick.

-kb