While on a visit in Romania, where Bill Gates participated in the celebration of 10 years since the Microsoft branch has been running there, and the launch of Vista, declared that, with the right amount of administration, the new Vista could run life support systems in hospitals. Here is a fragment from the interview:
Journalist: Let’s imagine a hospital where life support systems are running Vista. Would you trust it with your life?
Bill Gates: Security has been the top priority for Microsoft for quite some time and that’s why I put out a key call for us to focus on that in a very big way over three years ago, and that’s why we’ve made investments like having people from Gecad ( Romanian company ) join on the security action from Microsoft. The answer to your question is that, absolutely, Vista is the most secure operating system we’ve ever done, and if it’s administered properly, absolutely, it can be used to run a hospital or any kind of mission critical thing. But it’s not as simple as saying “If you use Vista, that happens automaticallyâ€Â. The issues about patient records and who should be able to see them, the issue about setting up a network, so that authorized people can connect up to that hospital network, the issue about having backup power, so that the computer systems can run even if the generators go down. There are a lot of issues to properly set up that system, so that you have the redundancy and the security walls to make sure it fulfils that very critical function. So we are working with partners to raise their skills to make sure that when get involved in an installation like that they can make it secure. So I feel better about Vista than any other operating system, but there’s a lot of things that need to be done well, and we’re certainly committed to step up and make sure these security issues are easier and better understood.
Using Vista to run life support systems would give a new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death"..
