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Your day wouldn't be complete without Microsoft news. Ralph Nader has written an open letter to Judge Kollar-Kotelly. Seems he has a few bones to pick with the settlement. MSNBC is running a WSJ article detailing how Microsoft beat down the DOJ in settlement negotiations. Even Israel knows Microsoft is a monopoly. Microsoft reveals its keep-them-in-the-dark plan for Microsoft security vulnerabilities. Amazingly, some security firms seem to be willing to go along with it. I guess they figure setting up a sort of cartel for security flaws is in their best financial interest. SANS is keeping their list of top security vulnerabilities up to date with the latest IIS exploits. And finally, MS wishes their new disclosure rules were used for yet another huge hole in Windows. Microsoft says it's "irresponsible" to expect them to get a patch out for a critical flaw within "a few days". As usual, switch off active scripting, even though that will make essentially every webpage that's designed for IE not work.
I clicked on the Microsoft security bulletin. I've never seen one of those before. Back when I first bought my gateway I actually registered with Microsoft online, and so I find it hilarious that an important bulletin such as this is in such an obscure place. I think it's only right for them to send this out to everyone who's registered at least, it's just the right ethical move. We do have to remember who we're talking about though. I'm still laughing about that bulletin. Aren't you supposed to distribute bulletins, not hide them somewhere? Ugh...
~ now you know
Just as a disclaimer, I'm not one to defend Microsoft is most cases. But what I think most people don't think about is that there have been so many bugs reported in MS software not only because MS releases naturally buggy software, but because the user-base is so huge that there is more of a possibility that these bugs will be found and in many cases used for unfortunately bad purpouses. If Linux/Mac OS/etc was the most widely used, you'd see much the same focus on problems with the software.
That said however, I don't care for MS and the majority of their software that I do use is out of necessity.
forma3
Firestone tried it, and, while software bugs might not kill people, they certainly do some damage. What did it cost them, $41.5M?
How are software bugs, especially critical ones, different from design flaws in a tire?
Indie rock lives! b-side!
ahhh... but Microsoft claimed in court that IE could not be removed from Windows so this is indeed a security hole in Windows.
Unless... *gasp* you're calling Microsoft a liar and telling us that IE and Windows are indeed two separable products?
Pardon my french, but *bullshit*.
Apple released iTunes 2.0 on a Saturday night. When a major bug was found, not only did they pull the installer *immediately*, but they fixed the bug and had a new one up in its place (properly labelled 2.0.1) within 24 hours. Not only that, but they have also said that they will pay for DriveSavers recovery for anyone who lost data to the bug. Can anyone imagine MS responding that quickly? On a *weekend* even! (Or accepting responsibility for its bugs like that?)
Reality has a liberal bias
It is proper for us to reject Microsoft's attempt to keep its bugs secret. But this means that we must also reject Alan Cox's attempt to protest the DMCA by withholding discussion of security holes in Linux, under his false belief that the DMCA somehow forbids such discussion. We need to openly discuss our bugs. Otherwise we are, in effect, supporting Microsoft in their effort to stifle discussion.
Yes, the DMCA is a bad law, but it's not infinitely bad. It does not forbid discussion of bugs or circulation of patches for bugs; claims otherwise are based on confused readings.
Error:
From the article:
The person who discovered this vulnerability has chosen to handle it irresponsibly , and has deliberately made this issue public only a few days after reporting it to Microsoft. It is simply not possible to build, test and release a patch within this timeframe and still meet reasonable quality standards.
I was reading through the "Irresponsible" link, as well as the vulnerability report. Information Anarchy is the phrase they have coined to display that information really doesn't want to be free. This, if successful, will cause a very adverse association to open source developers I think. If they "edjucate" their end-users into thinking that information should be tightly controlled by a centralized source, than it's easy to make the connection that the open-source community is villifying the information management structure that Microsoft and friends is working so hard to manage for the best interest of the consumers.
They claim it's not feasible for them to release a patch within 5 days. Why do I have a feeling that this code segment is probably less than 50 lines, hell - you could provide a hack just to filter malicious URLs in less than that and release that patch in well under a day or two without sacrificing what we all know as Microsofts high standards of quality.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but it seems this is a much larger tactic towards a revised SSSCA that will be in Microsofts best interest - much easier to add a clause saying it's illegal to release unauthorized security information about a companies product to an unapproved bill.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Many of MS's problems aren't bugs, they're designed to work that way. MS has had a poor record of thinking about security. They tend to think more of features, and what can the enable, rather than what shouldn't be permitted. Allowing a macro to be automatically run on opening of a document, which can then have full access to the system, is a classic example.
On another note, I'm not sure that Microsoft has any grounds for demanding to be notified about flaws in the final releases of their software. If they want to keep bugs from becoming huge public brouhahas, then they should either fix them in-house while the software is still beta, or open the source up and let other people actually fix it. They're out of line to say that people should find bugs in their ware, tell them, and then sit on their discovery while some cubicle slave works to make a patch, and Microsoft takes the credit for saving the day.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In the cases where Linux or unix has a majority market share Microsoft still leads the exploit statistics by far.
Of course, it's not as simple as saying that MS sucks, but it's a combination of bad design (dont put everything in every program, dont have unlimited interoperation between everything) bad programming(dont use admin privilidges if not absolutely necessary, also a design issue maybe), bad installation policies (dont install everything or even anything but the basics by default), bad admins and bad will.
The combination of these elements end up in software you dont want to be running because it will stink from a security point of view.
So, no, you wouldnt have the same amount of problems on Linux at least. You'd have problems, yes, but not nearly as many. Unless, of course, the general policies among linux distribution vendors change to install everything insecurely by default, but hopefully that wont happen, and in the Linux world you can always change to another vendor if one of them goes seriously astray.
Okay, some vulnerabilities might be difficult to get fixed in a couple of days...but with a team of programmers as large as they have...months is quite a stretch...they still have God knows how many vulnerabilities in NT 4 that have been known for some time! The linux folks can patch stuff rather quickly with a fraction of microsoft's financial and wetware resources. Show me the problem.
Derek Greene
I think if Linux or MacOS, as they are currently, were the most widely used, MS would still have more reported bugs, because there's just so much MS stuff. There's the kernel, the GUI, many applications, etc. With Linux, bugs in these would be reported against different entities.
Also, MS software is integrated on a large scale without sufficiently restrictive interfaces to cleanly separate it into individual programs. Since the number of potential bugs in a program grow faster than the length, this makes such integrated code more likely to have bugs; and, in fact, many MS bugs are due to interactions between different projects. With the Linux model, code is in relatively small chunks, which communicate over limited interfaces, so there is much less opportunity for cross-project bugs.
So I think that, to a certain extent, the reason that there are so many MS bugs reported is mostly that there are so many opportunities for MS to make mistakes, due to their size and the architecture they have chosen.
Let me play devil's advocate (seriously):
Yes, you can get a patch to kernel 2.foo very quickly. But it can take weeks/months for RH to get a package out. Perhaps M$ can get the code fixed, but not quickly send out a package (and in some ways they do. They send out hotfixes, and only later service packs).
Why? In both instances, the companies have to make sure that by fixing one problem, they don't create several others.
So yes, you can get quick fixes to Samba, the kernel, etc. But it takes time for commercial vendors to roll out the patches.
(And, having said all that, I used to use Progeny, and am switching to Debian. They get out patched packages really damned fast.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Reading this gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
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The level of fines that would serve as a deterrent for cash rich Microsoft would be difficult to fathom, but one might make these fines deter more by directing the money to be paid into trust funds that would fund the development of free software, an endeavor that Microsoft has indicated it strongly opposes as a threat to its own monopoly. This would give Microsoft a much greater incentive to abide by the agreement.
Nope. It's not.
The Netcraft survey crawls through all those little Melvin machines which each have an httpd running that nobody ever accesses.
Nobody cares about them. They are irrelevant.
Actually, it tends to go the other way - IIS installs as standard on a heck of a lot of WinNT boxen that do no hosting, and as (much as we hate to admit it here) most small businesses (big enough to have an always-on connection but not big enough for their own IT dept) use Windows. Most Apache installs are meant to be there.
Knowing how a security protocol works should not make it less secure. I can read how SSL works, but that does not make it less secure. Same with Kerberos, DES, RSA, etcetera. A proper security protocol should be secure even if you know how it works. Security through obscurity DOES NOT WORK.
This quote sounds like it came from Microsoft, but get this: he works for the DOJ! This guy James was the one in charge of the negotiations with Microsoft. He is supposed to be on our side.
It seems like he knows very little about computer security. It also seems like he believed whatever the Microsoft lawyers told him. No wonder they arrived a such a one-sided settlement.
Most evil is done by good people, and not by accident, but deliberately; motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
So, there's apparently a huge market for poorly designed, poorly implemented, but "feature-rich" and "easy to use" software.
Okay.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Maybe so, but what I don't get is this expectation everyone has that these security holes go through the same steps...
The real danger is when someday someone will discover one of these huge gapping holes, not tell a soul, and then exploit them for profit, terror, extortion, or simple chaos.
We've been lucky so far. For Microsoft to try to divert the entire blame is what is irresponsible. Remember who created the security hole in the first place....
Usually, I think MS has an undeservedly bad reputation. But I can't stomach their assertion that open discussion about their bugs is somehow unethical.
From Microsoft's article:
We can and should discuss security vulnerabilities, but we should be smart, prudent, and responsible in the way we do it.
Who chooses what sort of speech is smart, prudent, and responsible? The speaker? Or Microsoft? Since they branded it irresponsible to reveal a security flaw only "days" after telling Microsoft about it, it seems obvious to me that this is a request to let Microsoft control all discussion about their security flaws. This is patently unacceptable.
If we can't eliminate all security vulnerabilities, then it becomes all the more critical that we handle them carefully and responsibly when they're found. Yet much of the security community handles them in a way that fairly guarantees their use, by following a practice that's best described as information anarchy. This is the practice of deliberately publishing explicit, step-by-step instructions for exploiting security vulnerabilities, without regard for how the information may be used.
I don't think it's best described as information anarchy. Anarchy is an emotionally loaded term, like piracy. But anarchy just means "not centrally controlled or regulated". Do we want all discussion of security to be centrally controlled and regulated? If you replace the phrase "information anarchy" with "free speech", the article becomes much more enlightening. The author seems to try to address this by saying:
By analogy, this isn't a call for people for give up freedom of speech; only that they stop yelling "fire" in a crowded movie house.
But the movie house is on fire. The bug exists - your private information is vulverable. The responsible thing for Microsoft to do is admit that they made a mistake, and work to put out the fire. Unfortunately, they've chosen to blame the messenger.
It's natural for a powerful organizion to want to surpress speech that points out its flaws. It's natural - but it should never be tolerable.
Don't blame me; I voted for CowboyNeal.
While I'm glad he's chimed in on this, I'd say he's just as, if not more, "uncompromising" and "abrasive" as RMS.
After making their reccomended changes I can't use
Windows Update either. Very interesting, how ironic that MS stuff is these days.
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
What should be done about it is to inform everyone as soon as problems are discovered.
That is a period at the end of that sentence, it means there is nothing further to add. What we're doing now is what should be done.
Edith Keeler Must Die
So the problems that Microsoft patches cause are not solely due to 'oh, Microsoft software is so much more sophisticated and advanced!' but due to bad planning and inappropriate bundling combined with lack of disclosure of what's being altered. And it is going to get MUCH worse, not better. To cap it off, if they are able to suppress disclosure of bugs and security holes, they don't need to regression test anywhere near as hard as you seem to think they are doing- because all that will happen is that Windows boxes will mysteriously die and there won't be any publically disclosed link to connect that with Microsoft updates.
Hell, if they can truly cut off all disclosure, they can just STOP any work on security patches entirely. Who'd know?