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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."
From TFA: Steve's approach to security spans all horizons, not just information technology. He elaborated on this theory in an afternoon session today at Microsoft Tech.Ed entitled "Making the Tradeoff: Be Secure or Get Work Done". You are trying to get work done. Allow or Deny?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
In the United Kingdom we lost fifty or so people in the carnage of bombings last-year, in the United States you lost four or so thousand.
I don't for a second want to say that the loss of these lives through an unspeakable act of senseless violence is a trivial matter, but we need to put these figures in perspective. In the United Kingdom, more are killed in road traffic accidents in a couple of weeks than were in the July 7th bombings. In the United States roughly three times as many people are killed in gun accidents per year than 9/11.
Somebody even said to me that more people were killed putting their socks on in the United Kingdom than by terrorists last-year. It's probably true. This stuff is right in the noise level of the threats we encounter each day. It's dramatic when we see some idiots attempt to blow a car up at Glasgow airport but in terms of actual risk, these people are up there with being struck by lightning or having a bad reaction to asprin.
So why is there talk about trading liberty for security? Even though the security vs liberty argument is as flawed as the mythical man month, the point still remains - why do I need this extra security anyway? It's expensive, it costs me my rights and it's ineffective.
It feels like that we've forgotten what it is really like to be a nation threatend with annihilation. In the 1940s our country nearly didn't make it and we have the United States to thank for that as much as our own heroic airmen. That was a time where the agressors really could have destroyed our way of life. Yet we did not yield in the face our adversity. We held our resolve!
And we should hold our resolve now. In comparison to the Nazis these modern day terrorists are like flies trying to stare down a tank. I don't know whether to laugh or cry why we even take them so seriously. We should not give a shred of our liberty to these people - they are pathetic and worthless; you only need to look at the Glasgow "terrorist" attack to see this for yourselves.
Simon
They say this now, when there is Vista to buy. It's just part of Microsofts standard strategy... Release new operating system, try and make the old one look bad.
Open Your Mind. Open Your Source.
Or think 'operating system.' That's what an operating system does. It virtualises the computer's resources and multiplexes them for applications. It multiplexes memory and gives each process its own address space. It multiplexes disk and gives each process its own virtual disks (files). It (or a userspace delegate) multiplexes video and gives each process its own virtual screen (a window or virtual terminal). It multiplexes the speakers and gives each application its own sound device (a virtual channel). It multiplexes input devices and switches them between apps.
Everything old is new again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd rather deal with airport security than install programs on my girlfriend's vista laptop...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
SoftGrid isn't new, nor is it a particularly close relative of WINE as some Linux enthusiasts suggest. It was a Microsoft acquisition, the former product name being Softricity. It's not just virtualization, it's packaging, so a single file, streamed from a server as needed, encompasses the program and all of its settings, creating a layer over the regular file system, registry, etc. with copy on write functionality; if the program tries to change the host OS in any way, it just adds to the shell of program specific settings within the single packaging file. Extremely handy for network admins who need to distribute programs, and want the performance of local apps (once the whole package is streamed, it runs locally, with the streaming order prioritized based on what the user is doing), but want the simplified administration of centralized programs with standardized configuration.
Consider what we COULD be doing with the money spent on this.
The Cold War ended. The world was as close to Peace as it has ever been. We could have been investing in so many things to help the human race as a whole.
Instead we're spending trillions of dollars "fighting" a few thousand nutcases who can't do any more damage to the world than we do to ourselves, every year, in traffic accidents.
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?
But now we have something *new* that fixes all those problems! Really! So hand us more money, now!
Chris Mattern
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.
because I just found myself agreeing with Microsoft ...
People might get the wrong impression that I think all Muslims are murdering terrorists. Not so. There a lots of them who find the actions of the extremists repugnant. The problem is we rarely, if ever, here from them. Print a comic "insulting Mohammad" and there is rioting in the streets. An Islamic extremist murders a bunch of children and the silence is deafening. This MUST change.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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!
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.
I agree with Microsoft on something. Great, just perfect. Now I have to get ready for the 4 horsemen, a rain of fire and the end of time.
On the plus side that means I won't have to mow this week.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I disagree.
It used to be this way with immigrants from Europe, etc. However, it is not this way with Islamic immigrants.
A recent poll in Britain found that most second-generation immigrants want Sharia Law to be instituted there. This isn't the first-generation immigrants from Pakistan and elsewhere; this is their kids, who grew up in Britain. The first-generation immigrants don't seem to be causing any problems; they just want a decent life and job. Their kids are embracing the ways of radical Islam. The same thing is happening in France.
There was a movie about this a while ago, called "My Son the Fanatic". Check it out.
Virtual machines per application?
So next they will want to save RAM and speed things up with pass-thru hooks like what is already done with the virtual network interfaces but taken to the next level... It seems like a bad progression towards an actually working OS... How about we get the OS to WORK with the memory protection and better manage abstracted hardware??
Am I the only one who sees virtual machines as a solution to problems that mostly shouldn't exist or at least not to the severity that one would seriously consider that a solution?
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