Slashdot Mirror
MS Exec: 'Our products just aren't engineered for security'
Various Microsoft news tidbits contributed by numerous readers: Phoebus0 notes that Microsoft's Vice-President in charge of Windows development states flat out that Microsoft products aren't engineered for security, absolutely guaranteeing he'll have tomorrow's Ditherati quote. Many readers submitted this Knowledge Base article stating that Microsoft is mystified by a wave of successful hacks on assorted versions of Windows (there's also a news report on this). Microsoft has another security bulletin out on the digital certificate spoofing bug that has caused them so many problems recently.
Another excuse to let people believe that palladium is needed :/
This might be a stupid point, but of course microsoft products aren't engineered for security. The common man doesn't buy products for security, and even now the common man largely does not understand that they could even have their functionality in a secure environment (though arguably most salesguys cannot have the functionality they demand in a secure environment, but that's another debate.)
Brian Valentine, formally senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, looking for VP/management job with software company.
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
While working at Sony, Microsoft closed down a UK R&D facility. A whole department of ex-MS software engineers came to work in my department. They were the some of the best engineers I have ever worked with, designing innovative and stable code years ahead of its time.
Stop picking on MS engineers for poor products, and level the blame at the correct place - marketing and management.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Is whether this will make the national news. Trust me, if CNN and MS/NBC and all the rest choose not to cover this, the general public won't know, and won't really make a decision based on this information.
Of course, this could just be a ploy to get M$'s most vile next O/S out, Palladium, that will let them 0\/\/|\| j00r s0ul (and credit card, and email, and music, and movies, and any personal items that may happen to be sitting on top of your computer...)
Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Anybody want some more coffee!? *puffs on a cigarette* I'm gonna get some more coffee... *shakes and walks around of the room*
Why bother.
Saying they are "not engineered" is a statement of your naivity. Imagine designing and coding a huge prog. such as Windows or MS Office... Do you think they sit a big room and just piece code together like a puzzle? Please don't say that they are not engineered...
Hrm... sit in a big room and just piece together code like a puzzle? Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like, half the time. Counter-intuitive commands, shoddy execution, worse then useless help systems.... yup, yup, yup.
Now, was it done that way? Obviously not. But they definitely need some improvement between the design phase, the engineering phase, and the implementation phase.
And quite frankly, I don't want pretty. I want functional. I want an easy to use system, not one that sparkles and gleams. I don't want bells and whistles. I don't want little pop-up paperclip buddies (and how freaking long did it take to add that piece of feces?), and I don't want programs that think they know what I want to do and are wrong half the time.
I want a system that does what I tell it to, not what it thinks I want. I want something that is coded efficiently, smoothly, and takes up a minimum of space.
And I want it by Thursday.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
User friendliness? I'm sorry, what part of "--help" don't you understand?
I have not heard of any instances of marketeering guffbags and manglement ruining code, primarily because they don't code.
They ruin the code by ruining the requirements. In a firm that produces mass-market software, the marketing department generally writes each product's requirements document. If resistance to buffer overflow attacks isn't specified as a must-have in the requirements document, then it will surely get cut at the last minute in favor of other requirements such as ship date.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is a guy recognized as a genius in the Tobacco industry. I read that twenty odd years ago he told other Tobacco industry executives that, while they could afford to hire the shrewdest, meanest, most dishonest lawyers on planet Earth, they could only fight a rear-guard action.
Eventually, he told his colleagues, even the meanest lawyers couldn't hold off lawsuits over the lethal effects of their product. Once suits go to trial, everything will start to unravel. We have no real defense. So, we need to plan ahead.
His plan? Pretend to fight against mandatory warnings, but actually let them go ahead. Keep stalling on the trials -- so that when the trials happen we have a defense.
"But, your honour, we have had to have health warnings on our products for fifteen years. The claimant can't say they didn't know our products were dangerous."
Are Microsoft executives any more ethical than Tobacco executives?
Nah.
I believe that MS planned ahead too. I believe that MS has wanted to "own" the desktop, to own our computers, all along.
Anyone could have foreseen that embedding a macro language in their data files, that was automatically executed when the file was opened, was a sure guarantee of terrible security problems.
This was not an accident. This was a design decision. They did this on purpose. I don't believe it was a mistake. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing.
I believed that they looked ahead, and planned to distribute insecure products, so that the could harness the publics anger at vandals, interlopers and spam artists to justify draconian security measures that we never wuold have agreed to otherwise.
I'd like to see Gates, Ballmer and the whole filthy crew serve serious hard time.
Microsoft's approach to operating systems and security has created an arms race between them and hackers(both malicious, and those legitimately testing the software).
The answer is not to make the OS more complex and create more special cases, but to streamline it, and offer a more consistent model for applications and users to interact with the operating system.
This is why pretty much everyone else these days uses some variant on Unix. More than anything else, the appeal of Unix is simplicity at a basic level.
Now, Microsoft doesn't have to ship a Unix-based or compatible OS by any means, but if they want to take security seriously, they need to take what they have now, and what they are planning on for five or ten years down the road, reduce it down to the most basic components that can still address all of those problems, and rethink how Windows is put together.
Also important is to get over their antipathy towards the open source "movement", and realize that it can be a tool. If they released a simplified, streamlined Windows kernel, they could let the world hack away at it, finding flaws, then take that work and put the components on top of it that would make it Windows. They've "borrowed" ideas from Apple and NeXT in the past, why not look at what OpenStep was, and what Darwin and Mac OS X have become and borrow that idea too?
In short, it takes more than saying to your developers, "ship bug fixes in a week rather than a month." They'll hae to really examine Windows, and where the flaws come in, and if there's some other way(and there always is) that those things could be done, then the old way has to go.
Consider the above statement. Then go back to 1994 and set up three corporate LANs: one with Microsoft Lan Manager 2.x, one with Novell 3.11, and one with Vines. Use them intensively in a large, multi-site corporate environment for 6 months. Then tell me again that Microsoft's products are "just as well architected" as others on the market???
The point being that the LAN problem (to take one example) had already been solved by 199x. Microsoft ignored everything that had already been done and created its own "standard", which was decidedly inferior to the competition.
sPh
Isn't that the point though. Unix learned that it needed to be secure. And it changed and adapted to suit itself to the multi-user environment (where a lot of the users were college kids, just exploring what they could do with a computer).
Linux came along after Unix had learned to be secure, and was designed from the gound up with that model in mind.
OTOH, DOS was a single user operating system, and didn't need to be secure. When viruses started showing up, they were fixed in DOS not by improving intrinsic security, but by adding on a virus-proofing package. Windows descended from that. (And there doesn't seem to have been a fresh rewrite at any point, MS PR to the contrary.)
So Linux was designed from the start with security as a consideration. Not always a major consideration, but at leas a present one. It's been through many cycles of change and improvement, and at each step along the way, security has been considered.
Windows, OTOH, has always addressed security via add-on programs. (Well, NT made some attempt at security, e.g., it created users that it could be difficult to get into. And admin priviledges. I admit I don't know what they were...)
Still, in Linux security was built in from the beginning, and user interfaces was an add-on. In Windows, user interfaces were built-in from the beginning, and security was an add-on. In both cases the add-ons have gotten a lot better than they were.
I feel that the Linux windowing environment is now on a par with Windows, or perhaps better, but that it still falls short of the Mac. I feel, based solely on news reports, that the Windows security, while improved, is still lacking.
And to me, this is largely irrelevant. The MS licenses are so bad, that I wouldn't recommend them even if I thought that they were the best contender in all other aspects. I intend to file for retirement the day my company installs a system with Windows XP, as I don't want to be associated with any company that is either that suicidal or that unethical. (They've got to be either one or the other. Agreeing to a contract without understanding it is suicidal. Agreeing to that contract [I've only seen pieces, but that's enough] is suicidal even if you *do* understand it. The alternative is that they understand it, and intend to ignore it. [I'm not sure this is possible, but they might think that it is.] And that's too unethical for me.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Bingo. As Nathan Myhrvold once said, Microsoft wants to get a vig on every transaction going over the net. Tcp/ip doesn't have a built-in billing model, so they're trying to shoehorn one on top of it. Even though it will be a bloated, insecure mess, the government and the entertainment industry are and will remain enthusiastic supporters of palladium. All that data is an irresistable temptation: so much money to be made, so much monitoring to be done.
The real war will be between this plutocratic regime and the free software movement. The general public doesn't know it yet, but linux is very close to there on the desktop. This represents a serious threat to the universality of palladium, so Microsoft and its allies will try to have laws passed that criminalize free software use, and/or the use of general purpose (i.e. non-palladium equipped) computers.
Sound crazy? It's not. And the issue of freedom & privacy vs. big business & government is going to be huge, front page news as it gets closer and the general public gets a whiff of it. But Disney owns the news, so expect it to be more of a grassroots groundswell-type thing.
Who will win? I don't know. But I see a future that scares the hell out of me, and I really hope we're not too lazy to do something about it.