Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can You Trust Microsoft On Security?

Posted by timothy on from the trust-to-do-what dept.

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.)

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Umm... by evil_one · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Desperation is a stinky cologne
  2. Are we surprised? by rf0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
  3. obvoiusly not. by ethelred · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --

    Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
  4. Re:Definitions of "trust" by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    --
    Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
  5. Slammer by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.