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Microsoft: We Make Hackers Obsolete
bahamat writes "This article explains how Microsoft was forced to yank a magazine ad by the Advertising Standards Authority. In the ad MS claims that they'll make the hacker extinct. The tagline reads "Microsoft software is carefully designed to keep your company's valuable information in, and unauthorised people and viruses out. Which means that your data couldn't really be safer, even if you kept it in a safe. Which is great news for the survival of your company. But tragic news for hackers." Does MS really think that people are too stupid to remember what happened less than 2 months ago? My favorite quote from the article is "Clarke described Microsoft's claim as "laughable". "
It might be the end of advertising as we know it.
So it looks like Microsoft doesn't realize how lucky it has been in recent times.
SQL Slammer - affected users had better be thankful the packets only caused congestion - a packet 5 times the size but had a damaging (as opposed to disruptive) payload would hurt a lot more.
The WebDAV hole - a hell of a good job keeping hackers out of the US Army website.
The JScript hole - so just by reading my (HTML and JScript enabled) mail, an attacker could potentially run arbitrary code on my computer?
SirCam and Klez - information really does want to be free, it keeps escaping from Microsoft products!
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft owns Hackers!
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
the original mac mouse had one button because it was decided that two would be confusing for users accustomed to keyboards - a mouse being such an innovation at that time.
sticking with it since then has just been sheer cussedness.
+1 fashionably cynical
bahamat wrote: Does MS really think that people are too stupid to remember what happened less than 2 months ago?
You don't need to look that far back. Try this week. It seems as though Microsoft has an ongoing program to nurture and feed the *acker types of the world.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Plus, it's also worth considering that eventually, the new PC user market will dry up. Within the next few generations, there won't be a large market of first time PC users to fool with flashy graphics and a fat guy dressed up like a butterfly. Kids are learning computers, and that's bad for Microsoft. Now's the time to sell your Microsoft stock, because as a company, they're doomed on _every_ front.
I wonder how many crackers and script kiddies cut their teeth on Microsoft vulnerabilities. I'd wager that the vast majority of the black hats out there owe their "careers" to Microsoft software.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Of course they wouldn't. Such a group would not be insightful in the US. It wouldn't even be appropriate. Wouldn't make sense.
In the United States, corporations have the right to lie to you. God bless 'em! Yee ha!
The fool who ruled that corporations are the same thing as persons should be dug up and shot a few times. Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to benefit individuals?
It's not as if the Dodo went extinct because it fell into obsolescence. It went extinct because the Dutch sailors and settlers arrived in Mauritius bringing rats and cats, then cut down half the forest and clubbed the few surviving dodos for sport. Not unlike MS' historical conduct in the software industry, come to think of it.
I just read this to my husband, a Microsoft Lead SDE from Windows NT/2000, with many years of experience shipping that product line. His comment was:
"AAAAGGGGHHHHH! I want to throttle those ad people! What the **** are they thinking. What the **** are we paying them for? We know that our security *SUCKS*. We are working *hard* to improve it. We're the most hacked system and we are trying. AAAAARGH."
My comment:
If only more technically trained people were put in a tight-loop with marketing and advertising..... grrr.
But this gets back to a greater problem... many product advertisements are from outer space when we look at them with a rational mind and, when appropriate, proper scientific background. But truth doesn't necessarily sell products.
I spent all of those years as Anonymous Coward and all I got was this lousy number (204976).
Actually, an non-maskable-interrupt is a very specific thing: it's an interrupt on the CPU's NMI pin. CTRL-ALT-DELETE is just a regular old keycode, and is delivered via the maskable interrupt pin. It's just that the key-sequence is trapped in the lower levels of the system and never propogated to userspace. Microsoft could have caught another key sequence instead and had things work just the same way, but there would be the off chance that this other key sequence would've been already in use for something else.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The result of this evaluation is that both products are not safe to use on the Internet and as a public terminal:
(Read it yourself.)
So Windows is indeed certified to be hacker-proof, unless you connect it to the Internet, or the hacker is unwilling to cooperate.
I suppose that claiming Microsoft is going to "make the hacker extinct" (future-tense, no definititve time span) isn't quite fraud, but it does walk the line, since the existance of Microsoft goads hackers, and claims that Microsoft is going to eliminate said hackers--it only further inflames an already passionately anti-MS crowd. Nothing that is that hated by a group as intelligent as hackers, or a group with as much free time as script kiddies, will ever be safe.
Microsoft needs to watch their advertising people more carefully, as they're excellent at making the 'folks in the know' hate MS even more than they did already.
However, the majority of humankind remains clueless. "Whaddayatalkin'about? Microsoft is THE ONLY OS!, it's secure as Fort Knox, and the only enterprise-ready solution!" Gah. They'll just look at an advertisement that says Microsoft is gonna make Hackers obsolete, and read it as though hackers *are* obsolete, spread the word, and keep on not bothering to patch their un-patched first-release of Win2k Server that comes complete with Nimda, Code Red, and other buggy little 'features'.
-Sara