Can You Trust Microsoft On Security?

simetra writes "Here's a shocker... This story on Yahoo! is pointing out the obvious. How many of these until the suits start believing us?" Maybe the article is just trying to stir up trouble, though: ladislavb points out that Windows XP is an Operating System you can trust. (The review is also available on mirror1, mirror2, mirror3, mirror4.)

Comments

Poor Patches Screwing User Confidence?

[peterdaly]

Koetzle noted that while Microsoft's patches for the last nine high-profile Windows security holes predated such attacks by an average of 305 days, too few customers applied the fixes because "administrators lacked both the confidence that a patch won't bring down a production system and the tools and time to validate Microsoft's avalanche of patches."

I know I have totally screwed at least one "critical" production server by installing a service pack. Granted, that was NT4, which on the whole is just an impossible architecture to patch...or so they say.

Lack of security from the ground up in their design is what I believe the problem really is. The lack of a simple "bring this server up to date" scheduler doesn't help either. Even if they had that, people wouldn't use it due to patches toasting systems in the past.

-Pete

ASCII magic

[Compact Dick]

The "translation" is done using the ASCII charset which is used as a standard in computers, and the corresponding numbers are in hexadecimal form.

The whole message is F0AD:42494C4C. From this, we get "Fuck Off And Die: Bill". How, you ask?

F0AD == Fuck Off And Die [hacker slang]

42494C4C: break them into pairs, as we do with hex numbers. We get 42 49 4C 4C.

Now match the hex numbers with their corresponding values from the ASCII Table.

42 == B
49 == I
4C == L
4C == L