Darren Steadman

Prevention is better than cure is one of those age old sayings mostly linked with medicine, well I think it also needs to be applied more in computing.

At current the computing industry thrives on cure, entire industries have been built on cure. In this case the cure Im referring to is applications that compensate for the inefficiencies or inadequacies in other software or areas of computing.

The problem I have with cure is much like in medicine the cure can often have undesired affects and only partially resolve the issue. Prevention is better because it stops the problem in its tracks and never lets it occur in the first place. The problem with prevention though is its hard to implement and often has no commercial or financial benefit when compared to cure.

A good example of cure is virus scanners. Here we have a world wide industry employing tens of thousands of people and making millions of pounds a year protecting us from inefficiencies in operating systems; They are providing the cure for a problem that would be much better served if it was prevented. Prevention in this case is a much more difficult problem to solve and even the current cures don’t always resolve the issue fully. Like cures virus scanners often have undesirable affects like slowing down computers or making a false positive for an important application or part of the operating system.

The prevention solution to replace virus scanners is a hard problem to crack. Many people argue that operating systems like Linux and OSX don’t suffer from viruses which isn’t entirely true and there is the argument that because of their relatively low market share compared to Windows that virus writers are less likely to target them in the first place.

I wrote an article a while back about the Mac app store and in that I put forward the idea that Apple could potentially lock down the OS in such a way that a virus would not be able to run at all. I then became aware some time after the initial announcement of the mac app store sandboxing which will be a further attempt to stop malware and viruses from running on the system. I see this as Apples attempt at creating a prevention rather than relying on the cure of virus scanners.

Behind all of this we also have a moral dilemma. If a company can modify their software to provide a prevention rather than relying on a third party cure should they do it and more importantly should they be allowed to do it? For example, say that tomorrow Microsoft announce that Windows 8 will be using some new revolutionary technique that means that viruses and malware could no longer exist on their systems should they be allowed to ship it? Now you may think I’ve gone mad here and you might be saying to yourself of course they should ship it who wants viruses and malware on their systems and who wants virus scanners slowing things down? Well removing the need for that virus scanner removes the need for that world wide industry employing tens of thousands of people and making millions of pounds every year; with the way the global economy currently is the last thing we really want to be doing is destroying industries over night. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for change and I think as technology progresses we will see a lot of changes in the world like this, but it doesn’t mean that the question shouldn’t be asked.

Another case of prevention vs cure can be seen from the recent articles going around the internet about turning comments off on blogs. I posted a reply to these articles in general, and it highlights to a degree what I’ve been talking about here, in this case using spam filters and moderation as the cure to a problem that needs a prevention (The article outlines a potential prevention).

There is of course the commercial argument for cure over prevention. There is more money to be made from cure than prevention. Making an OS that is already market leader no longer require a virus scanner is probably not likely to make that market share any greater, it might make the customer more happy with the product but it’s not likely to make any more money where as a virus scanner can have reoccurring revenue charging a customer a monthly fee to get the latest virus definitions to keep their systems safe. So this begs the question of is there any real motivation to do the hard thing of implementing prevention?

While I’ve only listed virus scanners as the main culprit here there are many other examples throughout computing, email spam filters, firewalls, tools to detect memory leaks in software, the list goes on and on.

I’m sure as time goes by more and more problems will move from cure to prevention as generally speaking prevention gives the user a better experience and creates a better more efficient system.

While the problem of prevention is a hard one I think it also creates more interesting and unique solutions and a certain level of elegance and efficiency that interests me greatly.