Slashdot Mirror
Hack in the Box Meets Windows Vista
Strange_Brew writes "It appears Microsoft is really going all out to get Windows Vista secured before its release date in 2007. There's an article on PC World which talks about Microsoft's plan to give Asia's largest hackers conference an inside look at the new security features in Windows Vista this coming September." From the article: "The Hack In The Box conference will host two speakers from Microsoft. The first, Dave Tamasi, a lead security program manager at Microsoft, will give a presentation on security engineering in Vista. The talk will include a discussion about features suggested by hackers and other security conscious members of the computing community, in addition to security improvements made on Vista. The second speaker, Douglas MacIver, a penetration engineer at Microsoft, will review Vista's BitLocker Drive Encryption and the company's analysis of threats and attempts to penetrate the security feature."
I dont think that this and the anouncement about the Jan release are coincidental. Maybe they realize what is at stake. I dont use Windows and I certainly dont like M$, but i cant really find any reason why this or any further delays are bad. They may not indicate anything, but i think you really have to wait for the dust to settle before making a judgement, Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of a new era at Microsoft. Maybe one where they understand that Monopoly=Responsibility.
OR
not
One of the common myths is that Windows is just a victum of it's own success. The logic behind the myth is that if Mac or Linux where just as popular then the same exact problems would occur.
There is one major difference... Mac and Linux allow privileged processes to remove (and even replace) a file that still is in use. Vista continues to "protect" files that are in use from deletion.
...it probably requires clarification.
The box they built themselves into - or rather that they had to build around themselves - isn't so much the box that is the security model in Windows. I have no doubt whatsoever that Microsoft is entirely capable of locking down the system so badly that nobody but the most powerful ueber-god of a SysAdmin can open it back up to a casual user, let alone out to the internet for hackers to 'crack'.
But therein lies the problem as well. Windows users are -not- ueber-gods of SysAdmins, and this shows in the decisions that they feel are forced to make. I can't spot it in all the Slashdot story summaries on Vista right now, but there have been at least two stories in which there was a reference to Microsoft dropping a security feature or loosening a security setting -because- major clients of theirs told them that things were 'just too complex'. And this is in an operating system that guides you through reasonably easy-to-read GUIs with hint balloons and help files up the wazoo. You can well imagine what happens if you'd sit them down behind a screen that just shows a prompt and a one-liner telling them that security settings can be changed by editing the text file "omfglolwtfbbq.conf"
So yes, they're in a box that is difficult to get out of - but that's mostly because their clients make the walls so damn slippery after plating the bricks with titanium and burned down all but one of the ladders, then stationed several million angry users alongside it, hissing and whining at them whenever they try and scale it.
They are, well and truly, damned if they do - and damned if they don't. But at least they realize that they are a little less damned in the first case.