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Microsoft Says "War on Terror" is Overblown
SlinkySausage writes "The endless security measures imposed on society as a result of the "war on terror" have become overblown and intrusive, according to Microsoft Redmond senior security analyst Steve Riley. He made the comments in a talk at day one of Tech.Ed Australia about software security. Riley also fessed up that Microsoft cocked up XP from a security perspective. "We let you down with XP," he said.
Microsoft also showed a very interesting new desktop virtualisation technology called SoftGrid, which allows applications to be virtualised individually, rather than a whole OS. Think Virtual PC or VMware, but instead of virtualising an OS, just a single application is virtualised."
Too bad you have to read him - not see him in person.
Oh, and a pity he makes the fron page at Slashdot for stating the obvious!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
"Our way of life is not under threat!"
Tell me that in 15 years when England is an Islamic State.
When your women wear burkas.
When your Liberals lie dead in the streets.
When your Christians serve as torches for the sport of Imams.
When Sharia is the Law of the Land, and the Magna Carte is no more.
Then Tell my your way of life is not under threat.
The Fact of the matter is, Islam has been at war with the West since the Crusades.
Muslims do not think like Westerners. To Put Western Logic over Muslims and expect them to ask as we would shows a complete lack of understanding of who and what they are.
Islam has been in Active jihad against the West since the end of WW1, when the Brits and Frenchies lied to them about giving them their own state.
Unless the West wakes up, and sees the same Big Picture that Islams sees,
The West is lost.
MS bought out softricity I think last year. In theory the system is great from an enterprise management perspective because it basically streams one instance of an application to many desktops.
:) )
We actually use softgrid for citrix(softgrid steams to citrix, citrix streams to remote user). We've had some issues with it but very few compared to our regular problems across our citrix environment.
Now the interesting part of softgrid is it's ability to sequence and stream a small set of the app. For instance after evaluating visio, we discovered most of the users only used 20% of the app, so softgrid only deployed that small footprint. Neat technology, and we will be using it next year when we move to XP for my environment of 7000+ desktops. (We're slow moving to new OS's
Okay, I can't speak for Britain, but come on man, have some faith in your own culture. The only thing preventing first-generation immigrants is nostalgia, if they're old enough. However the younger generation will easily be indoctrinated into the culture quite rapidly. Especially western culture which has already proven powerful enough to invade the whole world. You know, previous generations of immigrants did not magically integrate. It takes time, but it's inevitable. Sure the old culture is subtly changed over time by this influx, but it's a good thing. Do you really want to inbreed yourselves until your eyes are all half an inch apart and your culture is as flavorless as the food you eat?
What's the big security problem with XP? It installed by default with a firewall that denied inbound connections. It allowed people to easily give the kids and the wife non-admin access to a shared system. It automatically tells me when new security patches are available from Microsoft, and it always installs them without incident. It even complains (through a tray icon) when my virus-checker's images were getting out of date. I've been running the same XP system on my laptop now for about three years; I haven't had any spyware, viruses or worms yet, and the system still boots as fast as the day I got it. So...what's the beef with security?
WINE isn't a virtualisation product, fyi.
Sir, I suspect that one of the reasons why you don't hear an answer is that some of your interlocutors are frozen in disbelief.
Although the USA may try valiantly, not everyone who displeases the government can be incarcerated. People think Guantanamo is bad; the US prison system is a systemic Guantanamo fit to burst with the highest percentage of incarceration in the world.
Do all the people who are not incarcerated have any reason to be concerned? If the government is above the law and there is no law to protect them, the only protection they have is their sleepy ignorance of their vulnerability.
You would call their sleepy ignorance proof that they have no cause for worry. Coincidentally, there's a group of men in the White House who agree with you.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Maybe things have improved in Vista, but the user separation on Windows XP seems to be designed to drive you insane.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
After reading the blurb on this, it sounds an awful lot like "Solaris Zones" -- which is similar to BSD Jails or OpenVZ on Linux.
It's a kernel level partitioning of resources, to create virtualized hosts with low overhead. They all use the same kernel (so you couldn't have Linux/Windows/Mac virtual machines), but each system/app is unaware of the others.
That way, you can have two virtual instances, each running Apache, but with different/conflicting middleware below it -- and no worries about them crapping on one another.
The example they give in the article is being able to run Office 2003 and Office 2007 on the same machine. The concept behind it is cool. But, doesn't that example illustrate a lot of what is wrong with Windows -- they need an all new virtualization technology just to install two versions of Office on your PC?!?
Terrorism isn't sensless violence to those who would give up their life rather than be under the tyranny of a foreign power. Its called asymmetrical warfare.
Instead of restricting our freedoms why don't we stop manipulating foreign governments and meddling in the affairs of other nations and mind our own business. That would put an end to terrorism.
Who created Israel?
Who caused the Irainian revolution?
Who divided up Africa into the mess of nations it is today?
Who enslaved the Africans for their own benefit?
Who can't understand anyone but themselves?
Hmmm the answer seems to be the USA and Great Britian. Western European legacy. Cheers.
have far greater support among muslims, including but not limited to:
* Freedom of speech
* Women's rights
* Homophobia
* Religious law
* Forced marriage
* Repressed view of nudity and sexuality
* Female sex mutilation
* Honor killings
Sounds to me like they're doing pretty well, if they support Freedom of Speech and Women's Rights they're off to a good start. Those other things on the list we(here in the US of A) are not much better off at. We're CERTAINLY not in a position to dictate these things to anyone else.
Here in the US, in *most* (but not all) places, homosexuality is illegal. It's a technical matter that no one is ever prosecuted on, of course, but that doesn't make it legal -- there are sodomy laws all over the books here. So someone would be justified, in my opinion, in claiming we support homophobia.
Religious law? Bible belt? Judges convinced that our laws are based on the Bible and the 10 commandments! Okay, yup, same here again, we have support for religious law.
Forced marriage? Only if she's pregnant... haw haw... okay, I guess this is one thing on your list that they support that we do not. If there are large groups here that support this I am unaware of them.
Repressed view of nudity and sexuality? Can a woman breast-feed her child in public in the US? Not in a lot of places; many people have been arrested or ejected from private property for it. And let's not even talk about gratuitious sexuality -- why can women not run around topless if they want? Hint: it's not because we're civilized. Civilized people aren't upset by boobies (or ankles). So we also support repressed views of nudity and sexuality.
Female sex multilation -- not common in the states. But why do you only specify female? In most cases it is the analogous thing being done to men; most female circumcisions remove the hood over the clitoris (most, I said!) and most male circumcisions remove the foreskin; which is the equivalent male structure. So why do you only get up in arms about the females? As a male, my own circumcision was forced on me, I had no more choice than a female does in that other country. So you discriminate by gender -- but I'm still going to chalk this up as somehting that is supported in the states as well; sexual mutiliation (regardless of gender).
Honor killings - Many states in the US still apply the death penalty for cases where the criminal has done something that is very repugnant.
So yes, I'm obviously stretching definitions to make a point, but I think it's an important one.
I'm surprised to hear from you that they largely support Freedom of Speech and Women's Rights. What I've heard elsewhere is that they do not.
Microsoft also showed a very interesting new desktop virtualisation technology called SoftGrid, which allows applications to be virtualised individually, rather than a whole OS. Think Virtual PC or VMware, but instead of virtualising an OS, just a single application is virtualised.
Back in January I was at a VMWare User Conference and the main speaker talked about how VMWare was working with Oracle and other software vendors to do this very thing. Their take was to have a VMWare server running enterprise apps without the guest OS, which would speed up the host by not having the OS overhead. I gather that the apps have very basic drivers to handle video, network and such (if needed) with not much else, and because they will run on VMWare the drivers will be a minimal standard. I haven't seen anything official about this yet but I gather it is on it's way.
Me: The tasks requiring privilege are arbitrary and I have to "log on" (i.e., put in my administrator password) too much.
You: You don't know enough to comment! You can use "Run As..." to cut the arbitrary password BS in half!
Sorry, still not sold.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex speech.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Heed was not taken and arose it did..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I call BS on this.
.jpg images with "mirage" instead of "kview" by default, why should I not be able to set that? This is an issue purely about user preferences, just like what I want my screen saver and desktop background to be. How would "security vulnerabilities" have anything to do with this?
First, print drivers have no reason to be kernel-mode. None whatsoever. Printers are either connected through ethernet (the proper way), or USB (the cheap way). Either way, there's no reason for kernel-mode drivers; user-mode drivers can do all the work of formatting the data to be sent to the device. Notice that in Linux, all printer drivers are user-mode, and are usually actually called "filters", since they're just changing the data, not directly interacting with low-level hardware. Usually, all that needs to be done is convert the file to Postscript or PCL or some other printer control language.
However, the norm on Linux systems is that root sets up printers and printer drivers, because it's easier that way and makes more sense: the printer is a system-connected device, not one which each user should have to set up himself. So root sets up the printer with CUPS, and then users just have to select it and print to it.
As for file associations, there's no reason for this to be inaccessible by users. If I want to open
Guess what? We also spend enormous amounts of money and gladly relinquish freedoms to protect us from traffic accidents. Should we just give up on that, too? To come to think of it - we spend a lot of money and energy on Cancer research, and people get cancer. And we still spend a lot of money fighting poverty, and people are still poor. According to your logic, we shouldn't be wasting our time on that either.
A few hundred thousand innocent lives given up to terror attacks and car accidents is a small price to pay in order for us to "invest" in the human race, right?
I'd like to point you in the direction of a virus called 'SirCam' back in the days of Win95 and the like.
This virus works by changing the file associations of your executable files to run via a hidden executable in your Recycle Bin called 'sirc32.exe'. It does this to infect each executable file run from your hard drive with a copy of itself so that if the recycle bin is emptied, any file that has already been infected that is run will replace it again. Thus it perpetuates throughout your entire system.
It has various other effects, but if admin access is denied to file associations, it stops dead straight away.
"The West now only concerns itself because suddenly we're the direct targets of their actions."
Make that "the USA" rather than "the west" - other western countries have had serious terrorism problems for years. In the UK there was the IRA and the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and in Spain there was/is ETA, to name but two.
Interestingly, look at this story today - 400lb of explosives found, with a strong suspicion of links to real-live republican terrorists. Notice how little reporting there has been of this?
Now imagine how big the headlines would be if a group of muslims had been found with 400lbs of explosive.
It would be the same amount of explosive - able to kill the same number of people.
I always wonder what we could have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent fighting in Iraq, if instead we spent it on alternative energy research. It always seemed like a better long term strategy to me.
"Microsoft continues to go to the bank on the basis of "You CAN fool MOST of the people ALL of the time."
How much longer will this formula work for them?"
Answer: Forever. Refer to tobacco, drugs, alcohol, religion and the 9/11 Truther Movement.
There have been some marches and demonstations by muslims protesting against terrorism in the UK.
. stm
About 1700 Muslims did one in Glasgow after that car was set on fire at the airport.
There have been others too, some against draconion anti terror laws.
You don't hear about them because they are peaceful marches and not very exciting news.
There is also a Muslim lead campaign called 'not in our name' in the UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6275772
The protests against the comic were orchestrated and planned by a few people, they were not a genuine reaction or representative.