Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Focus on Security
Anonymous Minion writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Bill Gates announced to employees Wednesday a major strategy shift across all its products to emphasize security and privacy over new capabilities. In e-mail to employees, Gates referred to the new philosophy as "Trustworthy Computing" and called it the "highest priority". Gates said the new emphasis was "more important than any other part of our work."" People criticized Microsoft for treating security breaches as a public relations problem, so Bill Gates sent this email out to the Associated Press to prove them wrong. (rimshot!) Meanwhile, Richard Smith notes that the Globally Unique Identifier in every installation of Windows Media Player allows websites to universally track users, and Microsoft does not consider it a security problem.
After reading the article, and also having my Microsoft account rep call me up after I have told her that I wont be installing my "enterprise" (every time I say that word, my whole team breaking to ST:TNG theme song), becuase the cost of making sure Microsoft's buggy software (generally Office and Windows W2K) costs me more than the operating system does itself in both actually purchasing costs of software and man power required to check, recheck and check again that everything is set up tight... My account rep had the hide to say this afternoon, "So now we have promised to do this, will you upgrade to Office XP now"...
Nothing has changed as far as I can see, nothing will in the next 1 - 2 years because Microsoft will take that long to get what we currently have running NOW working correctly, and I just feel this is another ploy to get Microsoft to force us to upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system because they are promising that this time, really folks, this time it will be the most secure and stable release of Microsoft software EVER!, as if this is hard to to!
Grrrr, too many NT crashes, not enough intellegent techs to figure out what went wrong, other than.. oh just reboot!
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
If microsoft can, by some complex reorganization of their development and review process, make their code have the same, or less, incidence of critical issue as, say, Linux (I swear I didn't choose that just because its the godhead of this entire forum), What would we do?
/. topics get more sensational?
Honestly, and not trying to troll. What will everyone here do if microsoft ceases being the evil empire? What if they can pull this off, and find some middle ground with the government? I said before, in a much earlier post, that most religions have an antagonist; What happens if we lose ours? Will
MS Press Release:
"Microsoft released a patch today to save 15K of RAM in explorer.exe"
Slashdot:
Microsoft wasting gobs of memory for extra red-dot in windows logo.
Personally, I say good for microsoft. Microsoft, right now, is an intergral part of so many organizations, and admittedly they have security problems; They could use the positive PR. They could also deal with less -unfounded sensationalism- nonsense from the peanut gallery (note, this does not mean the founded, intelligent, objective news items which from time to time may appear in the comments section.)
Just my $0.02, Refundable with a $2.00 restocking fee.
The last time Bill Gates was widely publicized for announcing a major strategy shift to his employees was back in 1995, when he sent out a memo saying they were going to focus on the internet.
I bet I wasn't alone in laughing. The first version of MSIE that was out at the time was a JOKE. Netscape reigned supreme. RealAudio was king of streaming. Third parties actually had a shot at selling a Windows web server.
How long did it take them to: (a) Kill Netscape with MSIE, (b) maim RealAudio with Windows Media, (c) shutdown 3rd-party Windows webservers with IIS, etc.? Not long.
Extrapolate amongst yourselves.
Goodbye ZoneLabs (makers of ZoneAlarm). What other big Windows security players will have their security software crushed within 3 years? McAfee? Symantec?
Unix users laugh at the inherent security problems with Windows, just as I laughed at MSIE 7 years ago. I haven't been laughing lately. Will you still be laughing a few years from now?
"And like that
Normal slashdot staff overreacting again. You can turn that ID off.
The defaults are everything, Why do you think Microsoft has negotiated so hard for its icons to be on the Mac desktop(IE), and no other browser is allowed to be there ? Why do you think Microsoft has spent so much effort controlling system defaults for media players, and IE home pages, and startup icons ?
This is standard user behavior - they do not change the defaults. Somehow it is the fault of the guy who installed NT server and NEVER WANTED IIS that he got broken into, and not Microsoft's fault for globally enabling IIS and asking the admins to turn it off.
Giving the end user a chance to change a system default is a good way to ensure that 95% will use the default, and the company (Microsoft in this case) can blow blame aside by saying the user can change it.
Now, you can argue users need to be more savvy, or you can accept that Microsoft KNOWS end user behavior and uses it to their advantage. Or both...
It's interesting to note how product teams resisted the security invasion. Now, while we know very little about how offensively these security teams were implemented, it does harken to a truism about coding.
Properly securing products isn't fun.
Implementing improved, automatic PGP hooks might be fun (hint hint), but slowly and methodically picking through all of your code to make sure that no buffers can overflow is just uninteresting and unglamorous. If we can't convince ourselves to sufficiently comment the code we write, even though we routinely curse ourselves for not having done it previously, security is going to be unfortunately naturally low on the list of things to do.
Likewise, an ounce of glitzy new features tends to sell better than an ounce of better security. People are going to look down upon you if you encourage them to upgrade from the old software you sold them by pointing out the security flaws that it had. It's usually more marketable to say "Trust our products, we have new inline spell checking across all our platforms" rather than "Trust our products, we no longer grant root through tcp/ip overflows."
All of this falls down like a rotten house if you allow your security to get too bad for too long, as is obvious to anyone reading this thread. You can let the support poles wear a little, and usually the cost of a *little* more wear is much less than the cost of fixing the whole thing properly. But unless you have that long-term vision, you'll be sleeping outside eventually. Microsoft didn't, and it is really starting to hurt them. The greatest threat to their monopoly has come from people being unable to use NT in critical applications. You don't want to force your customers to have to go to competitors.
Microsoft has shown throughout history an ability to expend large amounts of money to get things done. IE... MSN... XBOX... WinCE/PocketPC... If they really do set their mind to security issues, I'm sure that they will be hammered out after several slow, unglamorous years. The press release would make it appear that they know that they are up against human nature on both sides but that the company needs to take action or they will lose their stability.
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