Microsoft's Most Successful Failure

m4dm4n writes "As we near the end of mainstream support of Win2k The Register looks back at what it has achieved. What was meant to be Microsoft's most secure OS ever turned into a disaster. Worm after worm changed the face of internet security in Win2k's first 2 years. Five years down the line the battle is far from won, but the improvements are dramatic." From the article: "Things were different in the year 2000. Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal. We made it past January 1st, and then it was time to move on. Windows 2000 came out that first quarter, just as security was becoming more interesting to more people -- and Windows was a good place to start. It was also seemed to be the start of a new breed of Windows hackers."

Comments

Re:Pardon me, but weren't most of the worm issues

[OhPlz]

IIS and the repeatedly exploited index server were distributed with Win2000. The RPC port exploit was also a Win2000 issue.

I think it's a shame that they're twilighting the support for the OS. I still use it and have no real reason to upgrade to XP. I tend to wonder if the only "big deal" with XP is that it included a software firewall.

Re:Failure -- A bit harsh?

[zbuffered]

Turn off the Themes service, Automatic Updates service, Error Reporting service, Help and Support service, Windows Firewall... Pretty soon you'll be getting near win2k memory loads, and your XP box will look pretty good. I once would have agreed with you -- I resisted the 2000 -> XP conversion for quite some time, but I have adequate resources and XP runs like a champ for me.