Microsoft to Offer Patches to U.S. Govt. First

Elitist_Phoenix writes "Reuters reports that 'Microsoft is to give the U.S. government priority in fixing security holes in Windows and other software, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Under a plan to take effect later this year, Microsoft will give the U.S. Air Force versions of software 'patches' to fix serious security vulnerabilities up to a month before they are available to others.' Yet another attempt to fight off impending doom, by trying to keep the government away from open source?"

Comments

Re:Safety First

[KarmaMB84]

I think the shield of "OSS doesn't owe you a damn thing" is probably the reason patches are released 12 hours after they're written and confirmed to compile and *MAYBE* fix the problem. Whether it's tested beyond that is up to the distros or the users. ;p

Re:Safety First

[FireFury03]

I suspect that unless you are on Microsoft's new "A list" the chances of there being an exploit in the wild before there is a generally available patch releases just went up.

In my experience, MS usually waits until there's an exploit in the wild before bothering to start fixing the hole anyway...

hope you get

[zogger]

modded back up, because this is a very legitimate point and it's not flamebait. You would think the spooks would want first crack at any newly discovered exploitability. It's not like they ignore them or anything.