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.
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.
funny munging
Adult film star Ron Jeremy announced that in the future he would be focusing on dialog and plot development in his future projects...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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
Interesting post on debianhelp.org, accusing some in the GNU community of acting like Microsoft with regard to community issues
evanchik.net