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Microsoft Releases Changelist for Upcoming XP SP2
kylef writes "As we know from independent sources, Microsoft is busy readying Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. They have published on their website a changelist document (link goes to TechNet download page) detailing the nature of the security-related fixes and updates. The document is targeted towards XP admins and covers some interesting things such as the new Internet Explorer Pop-up Manager and various security policy changes. Some other juicy tidbits from the document: Internet Connection Firewall will be enabled by default, and there will be new support for something called "Execution Protection" which allows developers to make use of the NX (no execute) page guard flag on Intel's Itanium and newer AMD processors. An interesting read."
Thanks again for the .doc format.
Why not put such documents in a more Portable Document Format? Even assuming I have Word Reader or Openoffice, why on earth would you dissemante information via a word processor document format?
Uhh yeah, but it still shouldn't just crash!
Not unless they up the feature set - when I looked into XP's firewall, it only blocked incoming connections, not outgoing. I use outgoing blocks as a matter of course to catch spyware, etc, and to prevent Outlook Express/MSNIM from fetching images/ads from web servers, etc. I was looking at the XP firewall for my laptop, because Kerio made my laptop's suspend/sleep functions stop working (grrr) so had to find an alternative. As it turned out, I tried Norton Personal Firewall, which was actually quite good, and not nearly as bad as I had feared. None of them are particularly great at config UI though. Norton especially requires a lot of clicks to set rules up.
It's just occurred to me that maybe MS don't want to implement an outgoing firewall, given that the number of Windows components that randomly connect to MS servers is quite high, and it would highlight this fact if they did outgoing connection blocking. Hmm.
Bleh, troll, or did you just skim the file? Either way. . . .
What this new feature does (and it IS rather nifty) is detects which piece of spyware loaded up with IE is causing crashes, and lets the user disable said spyware.
Nice actually. ^_^
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That's an interesting point and Microsoft must be torn over this issue. On one hand, they could take this as an opportunity to lock out a few more dodgy copies of Windows XP... for the few days it takes for the inevitable patch or workaround. On the other hand, by waiving that, they potentially get to vastly improve the security of deployed Windows XP installations. Given the amount of bad press that Microsoft gets each time some Internet worm is doing the rounds I wonder which way they will go...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
For one, they've apparently made a lot of changes to IE that will make it less of a pain in the ass to use.
:)
Biggest pain for me (as a non-IE user anyway) is that they *STILL* haven't added proper PNG transparancy support! Every other browser on the planet handles it fine, even IE on the Mac.
It's not like it's a big secret everyone's hiding from MS
They are definitly intruding the personal fw market: Look into "Appendix B: Netsh Command Syntax for the Netsh Firewall Ipv4 Context" for the "add allowedprogram" command - finally, they realized that there is something like trojans...
They're still far away from other packetfilters like netfilter/pf/..:
There's still a lot of work waiting for the ms devel team ...