MS Cites National Security to Justify Closed Source

guacamolefoo writes: "It was recently reported in eWeek that "A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed." (Emphasis added.) The follow up from Microsoft is even better: As a result of the flaws, Microsoft has asked the court to allow a "national security" carve-out from the requirement that any code or API's be made public. Microsoft has therefore taken the position that their code is so bad that it must kept secret to keep people from being killed by it. Windows - the Pinto of the 21st century."

Comments

War

[qslack]

War is always the best excuse. One of my favorite cartoons on this is Mark Fiore's, at http://markfiore.com/animation/excuse.html. :)

Pintos should be offended...

[cansas]

The Pinto was never as dangerous as M$ products.

Forgot to Mention

[guttentag]

...sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan...

They forgot to mention it would:

1. reverse gravity
2. send the tightly-controlled, stable market into a state of chaos
3. put thousands of people out of work (how could MS pay its employees if they gave their products away?)
4. bring back Elvis (in the form of MP3s distributed by the masses who were previously restricted by MS DRM)
5. cause the judge's personal computer to automatically download pornography every day

Didn't we see this in Ghostbusters?

"He wants to shut down the protection grid, Peter."
"You shut that thing down and we are not going to be held responsible."

In other news

[MongooseCN]

After supporting MS's statements that all source should be closed and hidden in order to maintain national security, the US government has agreed to hide all tall buildings. All tall buildings will now be covered with large black clothes. In order to maintain national security, anyone caught talking about these buildings will be arresting. Since terrorists will be unable to clearly see and hear about these buildings, they will no longer be able to attack them. Thank you and good night.

Second Best Quote

[Lumpish Scholar]

"Sun's strategy of promoting '100 percent pure' Java applications discourages interoperability."

That's right; if you write a program that runs on all computers out there, you'll have problems with all those computers being able to communicate with each other.

Just have to say it...

[Flower]

They need to make a movie with Samuel L. Jackson as a Microsoft programmer just so I can hear the line.

Send me that service pack. It's the one named, 'Dumbass Motherfucker.'

They can name it something like 'Patch Lola Patch.'

Logical Contrapositive

[whovian]

Microsoft's view:
If the software has security flaws, then the code and APIs cannot be made public.

Open source view:
If the code and APIs are made public, then the software does not have security flaws.

So, Microsoft, we are finally in agreement, yes?

Re:Open source and security - some references

[gnovos]

This is a particularly absurd claim for application programmer interfaces (APIs) - by definition, APIs are disclosed to other developers, so the only reason to "hide" them is to prevent competition.

Well, they may have a point though. Thier "hidden" APIs can be a big security risk, such as:

BecomeRootUserWithoutNeedingPassword()
Secretly TakeOverMachineinInvisibleMode()
DecryptAllFilesA ndSendPlaintextViaWirelessCard()

and, of course the one Outlook and Word uses:

MakeProgramsRun90PercentFasterButTurnOffAllSecur it yAndGenerateVirusesWithGeneticAlgorithm()