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Microsoft Discloses Security Flaws in XP and WMPlayer

Posted by timothy on from the innocent-whistle dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "Salon is running a story on Microsoft's disclosure of a number of security flaws in WinXP and Windows Media Player, versions 6.4 and 7.1. The story also states that there are 2 critical vulnerabilities in Commerce Server 2000. Will I ever get the bang for my MS buck?"

4 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Anyone read Cringley's Pulpit this week? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe Cringley's right ...

  2. Re:Yet more unwarranted MS bashing by bludstone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    one of my XP-running friends went through this upgrade.. It compleatly trashed all his funky video codecs.. He currently cant watch about 2/3rds of the stuff hes downloaded. Most of them being independant music videos.

    has anyone else experienced this?

    --

    no .sig
  3. Trojan End User License Agreement by eswan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Has any body else actually read the EULA that comes with the media player 6.4 patch?

    Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

    Security update? Who's security are they protecting? There is no option to uninstall media player. Your choices (if you wish to continue using Windows) are

    A: Leave your system open to bugs that give system level access to the next worm (imagine nimda with a malicious /default.htm)

    B: Bite the bullet and install the patches. But if Microsoft releases an update that silently and without notification installs itself and 'disable(s) your ability to ... use other software', you're SOL. But hey, it's ok. Don't you know Microsoft is supporting 'Trustworthy Computing'?

  4. Just got this in my inbox? by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Interesting

    i'm waiting for someone to do a dns hijack of update.microsost.com and load a
    nice new trojan on everyone's box that their av software doesn't detect. if
    these morons were serious about security, they'd use ssh, not http, for
    updates (and let you turn off html rendering in your email client).

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.