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Microsoft to Focus on Security

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the eye-of-sauron dept.

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.

14 of 720 comments (clear)

  1. That GUID on WMP? Yeah . . . by GlassUser · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    Normal slashdot staff overreacting again. You can turn that ID off. Granted, they should make it default to off, and ask you before they go around putting out supercookies, but it's possible to fix the hole. Even in WMP6.x. This was going across bugtraq today. Apparently, if you have the ID backdoor disabled, it generates a random number each time the control is queried. Spare his page, though, I wrote this with no replies (first post, almost), and the page was already horribly slow.

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    funny munging
  2. Microsoft focusing on security? by BeneathTheVeil · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Shouldn't this be in the humour section, instead?

  3. secure comp != comp with winbloze on it! by neologee · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    install linux, remove winbloze :)

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    Coding projects blog - Code Slim
  4. In an unrelated story... by djrogers · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Adult film star Ron Jeremy announced that in the future he would be focusing on dialog and plot development in his future projects...

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    Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
  5. Why Bill Gates should be KING! by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Microsoft's so-called products are CRAP . Here is the quantitative proof:

    You see, it's really quite simple. Bill Gates wants to be king of the world. What he's doing is amassing a great fortune that he will use to buy the government of a small country. Then, he'll take control of that country and run it like a huge business. In other words, like Microsoft, just much, much bigger. Then, he'll use his great fortune from that to purchase another country. And then another. Until he'll own a United States of Bill Gates. Then, he'll be able to buy really big countries, and several at a time... He'll just buy a whole continent at a time. He'll buy North America. Then he'll buy South America. Then Europe. Then Africa. Then Asia. Then Australia. And finally, he'll even buy Antarctica. Just for fun.

    Bill Gates will use his powers only for evil. He'll turn the entire world into a big piece of crap. All the buildings all over the world will be in ruins. The roads will be all smashed up. Nobody will have a job anymore, except to be Bill Gates' slave. People will haul big bricks to build enormous pyramids and palaces for Bill Gates. He will sit on a huge fancy throne, and everybody else in the entire world will go hungry.

    Actually, I'm just kidding. We all know that Bill Gates will use all his power only for good. Every person in the world will live in a huge palace and they'll have everything they ever wanted. Nobody will ever go hungry. There will be no more bad in the world. Bill Gates will just run around making everything good for everybody.

    Actually, that's not likely--I believe the first one better.

    But where the hell was I? Oh yeah... to make a long story short, oh well.

    1. Re:Why Bill Gates should be KING! by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      And with Gates' tax bracket, that's like a needle in a haystack. He must be paying 50% of this country's taxes. Well, not 50%, but whatever it is, it's a pretty hefty tax bill. I don't envy him one bit. (Of course, he probably doesn't mind too much, otherwise he would have retired years ago.)

  6. Bad For Open Source by deebaine · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The post automatically assumes that Microsoft is doing this just for the positive publicity. But let's step back for a moment and assume that they're serious. After all, their commitment to features was real. Microsoft products are nothing if not overflowing with features (some of which even work!).

    Microsoft has the human capital to make good software--and secure software. They just don't. Their software is by and large unreliable and insecure. If they resolve these problems, open source is going to have a very difficult battle ahead convincing people that it is the better path. After all, to date, open source has been superior in functionality, security and reliability, while Microsoft has been the superior business. If Microsoft learns to do security (and reliability), open source is going to need to learn to do business.

    Let the flames begin...

    -db

  7. Re:Standard Corporate Security Policy by qqtortqq · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    > I just sat in on a 3-day .Net developer workshop

    You must have gone before the truth in advertising suit came through and M$ was ordered to change the name of that workshop to "3 days of brainwashing"

  8. Tell me... by Wheaty18 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Where's the any key?

  9. Some moderators need a visit from the clue fairy by i_am_nitrogen · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    How is it that somewhat-well-thought-out, sincere, calmly worded posts get moderated as a Troll, while arrogant, conceited, poorly worded, angry posts are moderated as Insightful?

    Don't bother moderating me.

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    A solution to the problem with music today
  10. Along the same lines as... by jaavaaguru · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Pope to support Atheism.

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    Follow me
  11. Re:Come on now... by xinit · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Populate Washington State with clones of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer?

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    --- http://foo.ca
  12. Throwing stones, glass houses, whatnot by m_evanchik · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Interesting post on debianhelp.org, accusing some in the GNU community of acting like Microsoft with regard to community issues

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    evanchik.net

  13. Re:Come on now... by doofus1 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Hold your horses, I guarantee .NET will some day run on the Mac OS and Linux. If Mono doesn't make it happen, Microsoft will.

    HaHaHaHa, I'm laughing so hard, I have to pee now.