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

Karma gets even with MS!

[ArcherB]

I'm kinda glad that MS gets to feel the pain of "overblown and intrusive" security. Maybe they will understand that it is better to make things secure from the beginning, rather than overacting after the fact.
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?

Re:Karma gets even with MS!

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

"It's measured against the current cost of leaving things as they are - if a couple of machines go down every week because of security vulnerabilities, that is a cost which can be measured and taken into consideration. However, if the cost is actually less than the cost of removing the problem , bizarre as it may sound, it might not actually be worth it."

Hmmmm.... Maybe Microsoft really does understand why I refuse to intsall Vista on my network.

Re:Karma gets even with MS!

[radl33t]

Since when did failure become a path to success?

Ever since scientific thinking birthed our enlightenment.

Re:Karma gets even with MS!

[EdBear69]

As Microsoft always does, now that the NEW version is out, they have suddenly become aware and willing to talk openly about how miserable a failure the OLD version was. This is Vista marketing at its finest. And in the fine tradition of Microsoft Marketing, it's a FUD attack against the product with the largest market share, in this case WinXP. Never mind that the product in question is put out by the same company.

Our way of life is not under threat!

[Ckwop]

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

Let you down with XP

[chatgris]

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.

Re:Virtualizing Applications

[TheRaven64]

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.

Choose "cry".

[khasim]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry why we even take them so seriously.

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.

Re:Choose "cry".

[Xtravar]

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. Hey man, the defense industry needs to eat, too! What, you expect them to go out of business in times of peace?

And this is the problem with militarily-funded businesses. They have incentive to not have peace.

Re:Choose "cry".

[MightyMartian]

The worst part about all of this is the lack of recognition that other parts of the world have been suffering under this very same breed of Jihadist for a lot longer than the US. Both China and Russia have been dealing with this religious nutcases for years prior to 9-11. Heck, part of the reason they're so widespread in the Muslim world is because Saudi Arabia has been exporting its maniacs so that they cease to be its problem.

The West now only concerns itself because suddenly we're the direct targets of their actions. Those actions are wildly successful because they're so visible. The fact that automobile accidents are far more deadly, or that more people die due to choking than the terrorists could ever hope to kill is besides the point. Those aren't sexy, top-of-the-hour, bonechilling, fingernail-biting, paranoia-inducing stories.

I have pointed out to people who think that Jihadists are getting ready to blow up their supermarket that the people of Leningrad and London put up with attacks of such intensity, such lethal effectiveness and such destruction that it makes a hole in the Pentagon and two downed office towers look like a joke.

Re:Choose "cry".

[Entropius]

Grandparent wasn't saying that the world would have been at absolute peace without the US invading Iraq.

But the world was doing pretty well -- sure, the Middle East was trying to kill itself, but it's *always* doing that. The people with the *serious* militaries, however, were at peace. We had a golden opportunity to *not* spend our national wealth on the military; for the first time there were really no serious military threats to Western democracy. We could have done something useful... ... and instead, we go start a dumbshit war that's wasted more American blood and money.

"We let you down with XP"

[Chris Mattern]

But now we have something *new* that fixes all those problems! Really! So hand us more money, now!

Chris Mattern

Re:What's the big security problem with XP?

[twitter]

Vista is not selling, so XP must be killed. They do this with every OS, so you might as well imagine that it's 2011 and Win9 is out and they let you down with Vista.

The terrorists have already won ...

[seyyah]

because I just found myself agreeing with Microsoft ...

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.

Re:It's not terrorism that threatens it

[Grishnakh]

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.