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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."
If only I could make as much money from my mistakes as Microsoft does from its learning experiences.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
but atleast it didn't took me 4 years to get my printer up and running... all in all I am very happy with linux, but why does it always have to be win=bad lin=good everywhere.
So we've got a Slashdot palgiarism of two paragraphs of a Security Focus story that was posted on The Register. Is this like "meta-editing" or something?
libertarianswag.com
I won't make an arguement about security problems in Win2k, since the article is correct. However, I will say that I think Windows 2000 is the best MS OS to yet come out. The GUI is far better then XP (IMHO), has support for all the latest "bells and whistles", and it is FASTER than the equivalent XP machine.
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.
I can't see how you can honestly call Windows 2000 a failure -- Microsoft didn't spend more making it than they made off of it, and it was actually (in my experience, at least) more reliable than XP.
I was the first STABLE windows platform that could handle multimedia apps.
Security became a joke, but stability was superb.
It was a gigantic leap from the 9x series.
Cheers,
Adolfo
A slightly off-topic comment, that I feel I have to make to someone somewhere...
My boss and I were talking a week or so back, and we were talking about taking a bunch of our libraries and somehow making them into something we can use everywhere. Now realize that we, unfortunatly, have about 200 applications to maintain, across Visual Basic, Delphi, Java, C++ in many flavors (Borland and MS are the majority) and a slew of other crap, including some VB scripts.
Now, obviously, a plain DLL isn't going to cut it... VB would be a pain in the arse to translate all of the declares to, and Java would need something similar to use a native library.
This IS where ActiveX control/libraries come in. And thanks to even automation, I can EVEN use said libraries in the windows scripts via a magical CreateObject.
The nightmare of using ActiveX controls on a webpage shouldnt blur the actual usefulness of the technology possibly elsewhere.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal.
It was a big deal. Lot's of us here worked very hard to make sure that nothing bad happened and this really gets to me when people throw around the opinion that it was all a fuss over nothing.
Get a clue.
just imagine if the nature of the stack wouldn't allow [buffer overruns]. If some kind of mechanism beside a simple jump had been used. Like registering an address in the CPU via an instruction and then calling that jump.
Would it annoy you to no end if I explained that you've just described the segmented memory model that has been available on the 386 and up since 1986? It just so happens that today's "Modern OSes" (right load of bull that is) map only two memory segments, then completely ignore the GDT, LDT, and TSS after that? It is, of course, done all in the name of "Performance", the mini-god for which many a programmer has sacrificed his first born for, but has never actually managed to show that this "performance" was worth it.
<sarcasm>But wait, we must claim that Java is slow in order to appease this mini-god! </sarcasm>
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
parent post severely affected by Linux reality distortion field.
Vote for Pedro
Article is pure MS propaganda.
- They're trying to divert attention away from all the security problems that XP has had. XP is BY FAR the "biggest disaster" of any OS in the history of humankind when it comes to security. Something like 25% of XP boxes are still to this day infected zombie machines. Typical time-to-infection of any pre-SP2 XP system hooked up to the Net was something in the order of seconds or minutes. But wait, let's rewrite history by claiming that 2K was far worse, so that people think don't XP was so bad in retrospect, and that people think MS were already improving their security between 2K and XP.
- They're trying to pretend, yet again, that 2K and XP were written in "more innocent times" when "security problems" were unknown - so that the public is tricked into thinking that their shocking neglect of security was somehow excusable. Spin, spin, spin. All of today's security problems were very well-known by any IT professional even by the 80's; even Java in the 90's touted security over and over as one of its major selling points, and when started pushing their ActiveX-based "trust" model in response ('hey, we have an object model, let's just pretend it's secure and market it heavily') anyone who knew anything was already warning that that was going to be a disaster.
Microsoft knew that security was going to get this bad, but they ignored it in favour of pushing for better time to market to be ready for upgrade cycles and attrition sales.