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Microsoft Windows: A Lower Total Cost of 0wnership
bahamutirc writes "Dave Aitel of Immunity, Inc. has written an excellent report detailing the lower Total Cost of 0wnership Microsoft Windows has over Linux. Dave takes a unique approach in comparing the two operating systems, and the results are not surprising. The paper was submitted to Bugtraq today and is available in PDF and Open Office."
I thought SCO were the ones supposed to be astroturfing on Slashdot...
Read it. It's the best TC0 analysis I've ever seen.
Scratch that, it's the only TC0 analysis I've ever seen.
(hint hint)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Mirrored here and here in case of Slashdotting.
And no, this isn't a joke, although it is kind of entertaining!
MD5:
19bd158b9e471db49acd91f0493b81ec *tc0.pdf
5ca7eb699b94967ee2d255c021e1686f *tc0.sxw
Lol I love it! I didn't actually realise that it was Total Cost of '0'wnership ;)
This is a very clever way of making a very valid point - I can forsee this report landing on a free IT purchaser's desks mixed in with all the "real" (or MS-funded) TCO reports, because it is so well designed.
And my favorite quote? "As clearly demonstrated, other than the toy OS Mac OS X, Windows has the lowest TC0 on the market." I love it!
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
not only does Windows have a TCO, it has a TCP - Total Cost of pwn3rsh1p
... from someone who stays up all night, every night, getting drunk? Oh, Dave Aitel, not Dave Attell. Never mind.
A couple of definitions of "parody" for you: Google's and Wikipedia's.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Forget the (sic) part - the title of the document is indeed '0wnership'. This is a good case where those who don't RTFA will be totally off topic...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Excellent paper!! I h0pe the Cx0's 0ut there take a l0ng hard l00k.
In my 0rganizati0n, we've c0me t0 basically the same c0nclusi0n. In fact, the c0st 0f 0wnership f0r wind0ws f0r us has been *net negative*, due t0 the tremend0us number 0f an0nym0us v0lunteers we've f0und 0n the internet wh0 are m0re than willing t0 0wn 0ur machines f0r us!
Linux can't even t0uch that!
And we should be able to mod posters as "Didn't RTFA" / "RTFA, but didn't get that it was a joke"...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Too bad we can't mod articles up. That's the funniest thing I've read in quite awhile.
Just in time too - bad Friday juju around the office at the moment. I think I'll forward this around and lift the collective mood before a coffee pot goes flying into a random cubicle.
Dude, did you even read my paper? It's hardly MS propoganda. That's a zero on the front of 0wn. It's a play on words.
T-shirt: My other computer is your Windows box.
Take care,
brad
Uhm, you do realize that this is a joke report. It's TC0 (zero), not TCO. This report is about how 0wn1ng W1nd0z3 is easier than Linux, not "owning Windows." That should teach you to at least puruse the article before posting nonsense. To repeat: This is a JOKE!!!
Come on people, are we so paranoid that we cannot understand a parody anymore? Don't get so serious, it was one of the most fun thing I've read in a long time. And we get angry when they call us "zealots". Our advantage over the rest is that we are FREE to mock up ourselves (and mock with others, for sure) and this "paper" was amazingly competent in doing that.
Good job! I do expect people realize it's unique "point of view".
It's a TC0, not a TCO- and I doubt you could come to any other conclusion with a TC0 comparing Linux to Windows. Total cost of 0wnership- that is, total cost to hack the box and get it to send out a bunch of spam or viruses.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I can't find the -1 didn't get the joke mod anywhere
Mod parent up!
Well, considering this is a fairly humorous joke, you still haven't.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I avoided using mod points just so I could post this tidbit:
:)
If you think it means Total Cost of Ownership, as it relates to some BS middle-to-upper-management measurement, then you didn't RTFA.
That is all.
Apparently a large portion of the Slashdot commenters aren't aware of what '0wn' means in the hacker/cracker sense of the word. If you root a machine, you 'own' it. "I got 0wned" means "I got hacked/broken into". Now look at the title of this report, total cost of '0wnership', not 'Ownership'. Now do you understand the joke/point of the paper?
You seem to have missed the joke....
FTFA:
Summary
Immunity's findings clearly show that the best platform for your targets to be running is Microsoft Windows, allowing you unparalleled value for their dollar. This result reinforces the fact that its important to consider more than just licensing fees when your targets choose their OS. Indeed, a variety of factors go into their choice, and over time, Windows has demonstrated itself to be the top contender in the, in both the server and the desktop space for Total Cost of 0wnership.
(Emphasis mine)
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
Trying to ever take it seriously in the first place was your mistake.
I'm quite amused at the number of sub-6-digit Slashdotters being reeled in on this hook...
I thought perhaps, that some reading this may not like to have to open up acrobat or Open Office... Enjoy:
Microsoft Windows: A lower Total Cost of 0wnership
August 12, 2004
Introduction
Microsoft has long asked third party analysts for accurate assessments of the total cost of ownership of Microsoft Windows deployments, especially against the Linux deployments commonly going into all segments of the market. However, Immunity, Inc. as a third party assessment provider has, until now, not done a thorough analysis, using Immunity proprietary data to tell the true story about the costs of Open Source.
Other sources of 3rd party information can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp
The point of contact for this paper is Dave Aitel, Vice President of Media Relations, Immunity, Inc. He can be reached at mailto:dave@immunitysec.com. Further information on Immunity, Inc. is available at http://www.immunitysec.com/ .
Executive Summary
Based on our analysis, Microsoft Windows has one half the Total Cost of 0wnership (TC0) of modern Fedora Core Linux based technologies.
Immunity's Methodology
Immunity has four major services: Training on exploit development and vulnerability analysis, Application Security Consulting, the CANVAS assessment product, and the Immunity Vulnerability Sharing Club. In each of these, the costs to penetrate (0wn) systems based on Microsoft Windows Technologies was compared to the costs against a modern Linux system. In general there are three aspects to 0wning a system. These three things, Vulnerability Detection, Exploit Development, and Attack Execution, were used by Immunity to determine the costs to 0wn the different operating systems in configurations encountered during Immunity engagements. As Immunity is not in the rootkit (http://www.rootkit.com/) writing business, this paper does not cover the costs of maintaining 0wnership over a given OS.
Vulnerability Detection
There are several factors that affect how difficult it is to find vulnerabilities on a target platform. Some of these are listed below. Immunity's judgments are drawn from our current collection of remote 0day in the VSC, countless 0day in custom applications for Immunity Consulting customers across many different operating systems and over 80 remote exploits in CANVAS.
Portability of common exploit development tools
IDA-Pro, the premier disassembler and reverse engineering tool (a database and a disassembler together make for a powerful combination) is able to disassemble both Linux and Windows binaries, but only runs on Windows. A Linux version is, however, rumored to be in the works.
PDB (Python Debugger), Immunity's newest tool in the armory, is available only for Windows (although the client is available on both Linux and Windows). This tool allows for many advanced scripts to be run, widely automating the exploit development process.
Ollydbg (Visual Debugger), is far superior to GDB in many ways needed for exploit development. In addition, windbg and Softice provide valuable options for debugging at the kernel and user level.
The TC0 advantage is clearly obvious for the Windows platform.
Availability of Fish
Finding a vulnerability is like finding a fish. If the pond is overfished, it's harder to find them. Hackers are rather evenly split between running Linux and running Mac OSX. As much as few professional NASCAR drivers drive Dodge Neons, a negligible amount of skilled hackers use Windows as their primary OS.
Not to mention, many Win32 fish are given out for free by Microsoft when releasing patches. (See
Help a college student
Um, 2^12 * 5^10?
The word "sic" means "thus." Nothing more, nothing less.
So tragic that the partial l337 mis-spell ruined it.
I can see the author mentally doing "lines"... .....
I must spell it 0wn3d I must spell it 0wn3d
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
also, couldn't he have just submitted the paper in fricken HTML like a normal person?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Well, you seem to be pretty bad at getting jokes. The article isn't about cost of ownership, it's cost of 0wnership.
I'm beginning to think the only people that can write and get jokes like this are the stereotypical, jaded, cynical, Daily Show watching, The Onion reading, Simpsons quoting Gen X'ers like myself. And I base this conclusion on absolutely nothing. :)
I think we've raised satire into high art that only few can appreciate or even comprehend. From my point of view, I can't believe anyone that actually read the paper couldn't at least know it was intended to be joke even if they didn't actually understand it or why it was suppose to be funny.
I suppose it's like that with anything though. Like someone who is an art expert sees some piece of abstract piece as brilliant, but most people wouldn't even recognize or know it was even suppose to be art.
"Are you being sarcastic?"
"Dude, I don't even know anymore."
Its an attempt at satire. Unfortunately, it a total failure. About as funny as famine.
I was getting ready to try out Mandrake 10 for my business, but then I realized that it often makes Windows XP unbootable on a dual boot machine.
Hell, you don't need Mandrake! XP will make itself unbootable!
True story - recently had an XP system with NTFS boot partition. It would not boot; gave an error message about corrupt NTFS. A call to Microsoft confirmed that this was "by design". Evidently booting on a corrupted NTFS partition may make data unrecoverable.
"Well, then, how do I recover it?"
"Reload with the recovery disk."
"Hmmm, you realize that the recovery disk, from this OEM anyway, overwrites everything, don't you? How do I recover the data?"
"There is no way."
Bringing up a Linux live disk with NTFS read capability got all the user's data back. Memory and disk diags showed no problems, so I used the recovery disk, reloaded user data and it's been running 2 weeks now.