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Windows Chief Suggests Vista Won't Need Antivirus
LadyDarth writes "During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed."
Run a program which sends out mass mails, or communicates with a server or does other actions then malicious people will write malicious code.
Just because a virus cannot harm the operating system does not mean it is harmless.
liqbase
Average user won't need Vista.
Who plans on bookmarking this story so they can laugh heartily at it again in a year?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Sure... and I'm comfortable driving a car with no airbags! Doesn't mean that everyone doesn't want an airbag!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
no, stop, you're killing me, ahhahahahahahhahahhahahhahahhahhahhha
Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
Now I'm using IE7 as my main browser (quiet!) and don't anticipate any problems with it, either. Heck, its *more* paranoid than FF is some of the time (it will quibble about http refresh redirects to executables, for example).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
i've been trying it out, and vista works for me, naked on the internet, without a single problem. in fact i would go so far as to say that V1AGRA HOOD1A GR0W Y0UR PEN1S L0W M0RTGAGE RATES L0SE WE1GHT MEET BARELY LEGAL TEENS SEE HARDC0RE SHEMALE ACTION
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That only took... what... 15-odd years. Seeing will be believing.
....when they announced that Windows 2000 would never have a Service Pack release. One would never be needed.
(still have no use for XP, btw.)
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
as I remember it was something like "you can't possibly write a virus for this operating system". Go get em boys.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sounds a bit like some unsinkable ship.
To laugh. It always surprises me when someone says "we'll never need this" or "computers will never..." I remember a computer magazine editorial saying we would never store music on Hard Drives, it would take up to much space. These people never seem to think more that a few months or maybe a year into the future.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
See, if you don't run av, then when you get infected, you'll have to reload vi$ta (which they only let you do once). Then, you'll have to buy another copy of said OS.
Brilliant marketing $cheme
Windows Vista severly limits access to raw packet sending to non-priviledged apps, meaning that packet forging is much more difficult. Although the zombies that are sending seemingly alright content (at the protocol level) aren't affected, those that are doing the SYN/ACK DDOS floods will be.
wow... haven't heard that one before.... No, really. I haven't.
;)
No system is immune to viruses. All it takes is a stupid user to allow it, and we all know there's no shortage of that. That's why antivirus products exist for every major OS out there. Even Linux has antivirus apps (though granted, most of them are geared towards Linux boxen running as servers for Windows-based networks).
Oh wait. Technically, if it requires a stupid user's interaction to get in, it's not a virus. It's a trojan. I guess Vista really could be immune to viruses....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Yea..........and 640K will be plenty of memory..........
And the world will only need 4 computers...................
And no one would ever need a computer at home..............
Sheesh......where do they come up with this stuff?
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Of course a seven-year-old on a locked down computer wont be able to do any harm. Kids that age aren't into the sites (porn, illegal downloads, etc.) that are notorious for viruses and spyware. Not to mention that the kid's using a machine secured by parental controls and is most likely on a limited account. Wake me up when the average teenager can safely use Windows with an administrator account and no extra security software installed.
You'll need to start worrying when he turns 12 or 13. ;)
NATIVE ANTIVIRUS
Seriously, isn't this what third party antivirus vendors have been whining about?
From TFA, it sounds like you really might not need an antivirus... if you lock it down with the parental tools so you can't download anything at all except from your own approved sites, that covers up a large malware attack vector that an antivirus is suppose to protect. After all, the role of the antivirus now and in the future will be that of a blacklist of known bad software. Everything else an AV does can be obsoleted.
Here's the same guy's promise about their last operating system:
Microsoft has said it has stamped out buffer overflows with the upcoming release of Windows XP. Jim Allchin, vice president, claimed the company has done a complete code review of its operating system and removed all buffers which could overflow.
I'll let somebody else post a list of all the critical updates caused by buffer overflows...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've had two infections on my Windows over the years--Nimda and a video codec trojan. I'm not counting the second boxes that I used to use for experiments--I never put anything important on them, so I tended to just not care, and blow away Windows when they got nasty--that was back in the bad old dialup days when potential damage to others was minimal, and Windows was a lot less secure. I don't know if AV would have stopped Nimda, because I didn't use AV back then. AV didn't stop the trojan. I used to disable AV routinely because it *is* a virus. It used to slow boxes down way too much, and cause all kinds of problems with installers. I always un-do the stupid defaults in Windows and IE, and I try not to be too careless. Nimda is really the only one I can blame on MS, and it was patched ages ago. I would probably disable AV on my current box, but they seem to have gotten better about not hogging resources and/or crashing the box so I just leave it alone.
I wonder if Vista is finally going to display extensions by default. That was always irritating. It would be *nice* if you had to enable active content on a per-site basis by default. It would be better if they just didn't have so much active content out there. Would I "just trust" a Vista box? No way. But would I run it without AV if there was none pre-installed? Yes, in a heartbeat--but I would still be very careful about how I conducted myself on the web, and I would still want to go through all the settings to make sure there was nothing stupid in there. And I would *still* be checking up on processes and registry keys from time-to-time.
But anyway, XP without AV is not a big deal--if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, that's a big if. Nevermind 7 year olds. It's the 57 year olds that you have to worry about.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What he actually meant to say was that it won't need any antivirus...for the first 10 minutes. That's almost a two-fold increase from XP!
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
The main attack vectors these days seem to center on "drive by downloads" or pop ups that trick you into downloading executables ("WARNING! Your PC is infested with SPYWARE - CLICK HERE to remove"). Most Antivirus software is unbelievably pathetic when it comes to identifying/dealing with spyware. I've seen dozens of clients who have so much spyware, it can take 30 minutes or more to boot up and then spend more time closing all the popped-up windows. FF and it appears IE7 as well will hopefully go a long way to closing this attack. Now we just need to wait for everyone with win95,98,ME, NT, etc. to upgrade.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
did I mention how
oh wait, this is
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
... and when his son becomes thirteen he will actually connect the computer to the network. ;)
This reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
I hate Antivirus products. They consume huge amounts of computing power, slow my computer down, and cause no end of frustration when installing legitimate network applications. In other words, the cost and overhead they impose is far greater than anything I've ever had to endure from viruses that I don't get anyway, because I'm not a complete idiot. I only log in as adminstrator when necessary. I keep up with patches and security updates. I keep my data, the only unique and irreplacable thing on my computer, backed up. I don't click on every idiotic funny ha ha attachment going around. I don't install software utilities from The People's Glorious Republic of Aziberjanistan.
I suppose if you're dumb enough to think you need an Antivirus program, you probably do.
Zealotry aside (FWIW, I am a Linux advocate although I use all three platforms mentioned here), the businesses are not "scared" to use Linux and/or OSX, they don't want to due to a simple reason that APIs in Linux and surprisingly enough OSX are moving targets which constantly break stuff left and right. Granted, this is not accross the board, but it is prominent enough to affect the overall product and warrant a significant rise in TCO. Case in point, I purchased an $800 OSX software 1 month ago. Upon installing it, it turned out to be a PowerPC-only application which surprisingly ran quite well under Rossetta in 10.4.7 (especially considering that it was altivec optimized). Then came the 10.4.8 and suddenly my application icon was crossed out saying this application is not supported. So, now I either have to wait for the original software makers to release an update (which they've been promising for some time but nothing has shipped yet and there is a lingering suspicion that in the end I'll have to pay for it), or use my new software as an $800 paperweight... Either way, I am losing in productivity and/or money.
Now if you consider how many times did the Apple platform switch in the recent years and how much overhead has that generated for the Apple third-party software manufacturers, not to mention how many API changes have taken place since 10.0, you'll quickly realize that Apple platform is almost as "enthusiast" as Linux. OTOH, whether you like it or not, XP in 2006 can run software made in 1995 without any problems whatsoever. All this means that businesses can get more mileage from their custom solutions and hence the market share disparity...