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."
...which is that they will find lots of holes that will compel Microsoft to delay even further!
Microsoft will never make Windows secure. They can only improve its software and make it harder for the hackers, but these things usually end up like at any other game - if there's a bigger challenge, there's also a bigger prize at stake and more competition.
Microsoft does have a good operating system in their hands and I'm sure Vista is going to take a huge leap ahead. However, history tells us that all attempts have been futile so far and I honestly think - no matter what you Linux geeks here say - that if Linux was on 95% of all PC:s, we'd see the same thing going on for Torvald's armada. If Microsoft was the small competitor, it would have been considered a clever runner-up with bold ambitions and virtually no viruses available, nor any known hacks. The biggest, baddest of all companies gets the most crap thrown at it. Simple as that.
Full Tilt
>>Since then who can count the number of patches, updates and vulnerabilities.
. aspx ) Thats an average of 3.5 a month... Now Linux, on the other hand, we all know thats rock-solid. I mean, a quick browse over to LinuxSecurity.com proves it -- only 16 patches! Oh, that was in July of 2006 alone? Uh, well, maybe that was a bad month. I mean, if you average it since January... oh, erm, over 1000 patches over that interval. Well, uh, that counts as one patch per distribution, and clearly thats not entirely fair to Linux... Lets break down that number:
>>
85 patches in the last two years (200 and change if you count all MS applications, including the ones not bundled with XP). (Shockingly, computers can indeed count that high: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/current
Distro | Security Advisories Since January 2006
Debian (between 190 and 200)
Gentoo 101
Redhat 69
PXswodniW 25
Now, I know I've got incoming replies that say "Well, patch/vulnerability counts don't matter for diddly, Linux is more secure than Windows". I actually tend to agree with both of these statements... but its sort of curious that Slashdot has this attitude that patches for one system are an admission of weakness but patches for another system show how a million eyes make bugs shallow.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The first... will give a presentation on security engineering in Vista.
Well, that won't take long...
The second speaker... will review Vista's BitLocker Drive Encryption and the company's analysis of threats and attempts to penetrate the security feature.
...and that won't take any longer.