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Microsoft Port 25 interviews Miguel de Icaza

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-read dept.

Ben Galliart writes "Microsoft's Port 25 blog, the voice of MS Linux Labs and a spin-off from the MS Channel 9 blog, has an interview with Miguel de Icaza where they discuss the Gnome and Mono projects. It is a nice change of pace to see Microsoft go from attacking Novell and Linux to interviewing a Novell employee about a Linux desktop system. Port 25 has come under some fire since they can not always be trusted. Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and a security guide attacking Red Hat for not providing security updates for Red Hat v9 despite that Red Hat ended support back in 2004. They have also released a password synchronization daemon for Red Hat, AIX, HPUX and Solaris that must run as root and makes several calls to strcpy() (which violates Microsoft's guidelines for doing secure coding)."

7 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft employee-wannabe by dskoll · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Miguel makes no secret of his admiration for Microsoft and is really a MSFT-employee-wannabe. All his talks I've ever heard were about how UNIX sucks and how Microsoft got the desktop right.

    Yawn...

    1. Re:Microsoft employee-wannabe by Planeflux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sorry to rain on your parade, but your own lack of competence with linux installations is a silly excuse for stating that "Microsoft has made the better desktop". Obviously various linux distros have their own quirks and issues, but if you can handle those, a linux system makes a great general-purpose desktop environment and is, in my opinion, way ahead of anything Microsoft has to offer at the moment. I am not biased or trying to stab Microsoft here, I just choose the best tool to get the work done. That said, it is far from perfect, and if Microsoft would come up with a better alternative, I'd gladly use that.

    2. Re:Microsoft employee-wannabe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting
      1. No clipboard
      2. No clipboard
      3. WSH
      4. Huh?
      5. Implemented (window stations and multiple desktops), if not exposed. Unnecessary complexity that can be turned on by people who actually want it. Why do you think OS X doesn't have them either?
      6. None of those is a standard, with the possible exception of PS, and there's plenty of that at the app level. "DVD"? WTF?
      7. The registry is not part of the desktop.
      You lose. Thanks for playing.
  2. Enlighten me by BlueScreenOfTOM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can someone explain to me why strcpy is insecure? No sarcasm here, I really would like to know.

  3. Doing more for security? by Caine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm working with Microsoft right now, and I don't think I've ever met a firm that takes security so seriously as they do when it comes to "normal" software, especially in the field I work in. So that claim might not be as much FUD as some would like it to be.

  4. strcpy? by ENOENT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can you think of a sillier thing to criticize MSFT about? Really?

    I looked at (some) of the code. They do a malloc(strlen(foo)+1), and, if it succeeds, they do a strcpy() of foo. THERE IS NO VOODOO MAGIC IN STRNCPY TO MAKE IT SAFER IN THIS SITUATION.

    Really. There isn't.

    --
    That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
  5. Interesting - used MP3 encoding by xtaski · · Score: 2, Interesting

    found it interesting Microsoft is using MP3 encoding for this and not Windows Media... hmm...