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."

Comments

Re:What's smart about a false choice?

[Thrip]

With real user and process separation Also available on Windows. I cry bullshit on that. I used to hear for a long time "So many people say Windows is insecure, but they run as Administrator all the time. They should run as an unprivileged user." And that sounded reasonable, so I pretty much believed it. So the next time I had to use Windows, I made an unprivileged account, and discovered that the restrictions placed on unprivileged users are so arbitrary and absurd that it's essentially impossible to work that way. You can't even change your own file associations. I had to keep logging in and out of my user and admin accounts all day to get anything done.

Maybe things have improved in Vista, but the user separation on Windows XP seems to be designed to drive you insane.