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

Umm...

[evil_one]

I don't think that the Yahoo! story is a Joke... it was posted 03/31 not 04/01... If it is, please correct me. I'd like to be wrong here.

Are we surprised?

[rf0]

With the recent spate of MS problem such as the slammer worm, IIS vunrabilities etc their public image is tarnished at best. However I think what people realise is that most programs have potential security holes. What people want is a quick response to the problem.

Take the two recent sendmail issues. Two big holes were found but fixes were available straight away. What about MS? Well I believe the record is 6 months after an exploit is in the public domain. Now thats why I have trouble trusting MS

Rus

Again ?

[Thanatiel]

This one is not even funny ...
That's why I don't like 1st april : You can't really trust what you read on the news for a whole day. I mean you can trust the news even less than usual.

obvoiusly not.

[ethelred]

Trust is earned. You don't becone trustworthy, just by marketing. Ask yourself "Has Microsoft earned my trust?"

Re:obvoiusly not.

[TopShelf]

Trust is truly the operative word here. As the article points out, patches were available for Slammer and other attacks, but admins didn't feel confident that installing these patches wouldn't cause further problems. The patch is worthless if people won't install it...

Looking at the NT4 no-patch issue...

[Lolaine]

I cant trust a company that says they cannot patch their own enterprise-level Operating System (only to force customers to buy a new one, because, IMHO "technical" excuses like that are ridiculous).

If Microsoft says they cant patch, then open the source for us to patch it for free :)

Re:Definitions of "trust"

[Pharmboy]

So, clearly people *do* trust Windows, in that they are using the software for "sensitive applications".

Actually, its doesn't prove that at all. Its partially a matter of who makes the decisions about applications (often clueless managers) and some may only run on windows. The other part is left over infrastructure from years past, like our office, where we still have programs we use left over from windows 3.0 days. yea, i know...

BSOD Screenshot not really from XP

[Ececheira]

Granted, it's from an April Fools story, but couldn't they even try to get the BSOD screen shot right?

That BSOD version is from Win9x versions... the NT-based BSOD has the text at the upper left of the screen, and no CTRL-ALT-DEL message either.

Let's wait: Windows 2003 is out

[m00nun1t]

It's all very easy to sit around and put each other on the back and say "yes, well, we've known this for years". We know that Bill made his big trustworthy computing announcement, and he said it was a forward looking initiative - they were going to focus on getting new products right rather than going back and re-architecting old products (a decision I agree with).

So, Windows Server 2003 was RTMed last week - the first OS released post-trustworthy computing. Let's wait and see the fruits of Bills initiative, rather than keep flogging that same dead horse. If windows 2003 has good security, well, maybe they have a chance. If it doesn't, forget it, game over.

Slammer

[SgtChaireBourne]

Security is the last nail in the coffin.

People aren't applying the patches in spite of clear warnings.

Even Microsoft's own servers got hit by Slammer. It has been quit common for Microsoft's security upgrades to break something else, fail to fix what they claim to fix, and/or introduce additional holes. The Slammer worm showed that even Microsoft knows that it's patches can be unhealthy for production systems. Other companies and software projects just don't have this kind of quality problem.

Even if the patches worked, and even if it had been an old-style, slow worm, you can't patch fast enough. But it wasn't. Slammer reached saturation in 8.5 minutes. Most likely this story was a tidbit to draw fire away from the quarterly financial statement or from the DRM/Palladium stealth payload in Windows Server 2003 + Office 2003.

Sure folks may wish to run Microsoft products for ideological reasons, but there aren't any technical ones and now the market is changing. C*Os have figured out the OS X, RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, OpenBSD, etc. are much easier install and maintain than Windows Xp and far more flexible and secure -- both on the workstation and the server. Novell Netware should also be mentioned as excellent. C'mon when was the last time you heard of MS machine reaching an uptime of more than 200 days? That would be embarassingly short for QNX and Novell.

Microsoft has been to computing what Big Tobacco was to sports.