Slashdot Mirror
Google Reportedly Ditching Windows
Reader awyeah notes a Financial Times report that Google is ditching the use of Windows internally. Some blogs have picked up the FT piece but so far there isn't any other independent reporting of the claim, which is based on comments from anonymous Googlers. One indication of possibly hasty reporting is the note that Google "employs more than 10,000 workers internationally," whereas it's easy enough to find official word that the total exceeds 20,000. "The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google's Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google. ... 'We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,' said one Google employee. ... New hires are now given the option of using Apple's Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. 'Linux is open source and we feel good about it,' said one employee. 'Microsoft we don't feel so good about.' ... Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from 'quite senior levels,' one employee said. 'Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,' said another employee."
'Linux is open source and we feel good about it,' said one employee. 'Microsoft we don't feel so good about.'
However, they feel pretty good about a closed-source implementation of an open source operating system on locked-in hardware? This sounds rather flamebaity and very light on facts.
I'm not as smart as most of you slashdotters, but this seems smart in that they can write their own security updates with Linux, as opposed to waiting for Microsoft to fix them.
Macs are IMO a WORSE security risk than Windows when dealing with spearphishing and other forms of targeted attacks.
How could this be true? If the system is more secure, and the user is a constant, then it's no worse "when dealing with [...] targeted attacks".
Security updates are rare.
That's not an argument by itself. When's the last time you updated the walls of your house? If it ain't insecure, don't update it.
By the way, I'm no Apple fan. I just think your arguments are ridiculous.
--
Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from 'quite senior levels,' one employee said. 'Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,' said another employee."
So what they'll do is get a new linux machine, and install Windows as a "guest" OS in a second partition. It's not that hard these days, and google is reputed to have lots of smart people.
Similarly, my wife telecommutes half time, and is required to run Windows XP at home. She talked to the nice folks at the Apple Store, who explained how to set her Mac up to run virtual OSs, and installed XP in a virtual partition. It works fine. She has since taught a few others at work to do the same, and they're all pretty happy with being able to run a real OS at home and only fire up the Windows that they all hate when they need to do some "work". She gave me her castoff Windows box, which is sitting in the corner running Debian linux and functioning as our firewall/gateway/server machine (and no doubt still listed as another sale to a satisfied Windows customer by MS's bean counters).
And all this is nothing at very new, as far as the computer industry is concerned. Back in 1980, I had a job at a company that mostly used their big IBM mainframe, while the engineers were playing around with unix on some of those funny new "minicomputers". I'd worked on both, so I had the fun of getting together with some Amdahl folks, who delivered their unix that ran on top of VM. We installed it (over a lot of dead IBMer bodies ;-), so that the engineering staff could run their stuff on the mainframe. After a while, the big 360 machine with VM was running at least 10 different OSs simultaneously, with each group using the OS that best fit their needs. Granted, there were lots of fanboys who thought their OS was the one that everyone else should be using, but we just ignored them and went about our jobs. Now it's 30 years later, and the "personal computer" part of the industry is discovering this fantastic new idea called "virtual" computing that lets you run more than one OS at the same time ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The year of Linux on...
Never mind.
That may well be part of Google's intention. Microsoft and Google have long been trying to kill each other. Tech companies seemed to have a policy of trying to scorch some earth around their market -- pre-emptive strikes against companies that might move into their competitive market in the future. So, Microsoft spent large quantities of cash to kill Netscape and AOL. Google are spending much moer than they are earning on Google Docs to try to kill Microsoft's Office market. Microsoft are spending large quantities of cash to try to kill Google's search advertising market. And more recently Google are spending lots of cash to try to kill Microsoft's Windows market. Taking the pain of moving a lot of staff from one operating system to another sounds like another effort in that regard. They hit Microsoft in PR ("see, one of the world's biggest companies doesn't use Windows at all -- it's not necessary for business"), and they particularly boost Linux's desktop user base and market reputation (they also boost Apple, but Apple needs it less). Not to mention the extra 20% time that desktop Linux projects might soon be getting...
Windows, if administered right? There are new critical flaws found almost daily. Windows can be locked down pretty tight if you remove the network cable though. I don't think Windows has yet earned the security ratings that various *NIXes have. If I'm wrong, please show me.
I had a Linux machine I put up get hacked once though... I set up a machine for someone and told them explicitly, "CHANGE THE PASSWORD!" He agreed to. He didn't and it was compromised within two days. After that, though, it was all good. Linux seems trivial to lock down but perhaps it is because it is less of a target... or perhaps not. Time will tell. But the nice thing about Linux is that there are so many of them. Find a flaw in one, it may not apply to others and even if it does, it might require some tweaks to make the exploit work as needed. The point here is that even though machines could be compromised "as easily" it couldn't as easily be done using a massive wave of self-replicating exploits where compromised machines go on the attack automatically searching for more vulnerable machines to infect. The DNA of Linux has very healthy variations while Windows is a pygmy village just waiting for someone to kill them with the next "common cold."
If they locked Windows up securely, all their employees would change operating systems anyway.
You have to get pretty draconian to stop a targeted attack like the Chinese one.
I hear Googlers enjoy having a network cable connected to their computer.
Tell me... what IDE runs on ChromeOS? Where's the Emacs for Android? When I see that, we'll talk. Until then, I don't think that Google's going to be able to migrate it's most vital employees (engineers) to "eat their own dogfood." Might be interesting to migrate support staff, but that's not where the heart of Google is.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The biggest threat to Microsoft is currently FUD.
Just about the only thing which is likely to kill Microsoft is if they can't pry everyone off of XP which is an outdated, insecure pile of shit, which, for some reason, even people who know better seem to love. Even Vista for all its faults was better than XP, and Windows 7 is miles ahead of Vista. Things have changed quite a lot in the last 5 years, security wise and otherwise, but you're not going to see them if you don't leave an OS which is 9 years old.
Those are personal accessories, and while they do say a lot about the attractiveness of Apple in the consumer sector, I believe GP was posting a slightly parallel question: i.e. can Microsoft employees even do their JOB nowadays without Google?
While I have no doubt it's accomplish-able, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some pains in a department or another.
This old myth has never been true.
Apache is more popular than the Windows web server, yet gets hacked less, which completely debunks the idea that being a market leader is the only reason Microsoft products are so shockingly vulnerable to attacks.
OS X is a GUI shell on a BSD layer on a Mach engine. Like any flavor of *nix, it was designed from the ground up to live safely in networked, multi-user environments.
It's an order of magnitude harder to hack than a Windows box, because of superior design. This has been demonstrated over and over for nearly a decade now, yet the MS fanboys continue with the silly drumbeat that Macs are only enjoying security via obscurity.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"turned into a liability"
Windows has always been a shoddy liability. Unfortunately MS has an incredibly good marketing team, that can literally sell fridges to Eskimos.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
No, you've got it backwards. It is Microsoft who are on a jihad against all things non-MS.
Embrace, extend, extinguish... remember?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Anybody who runs Exchange bare ass to the outside world is out of their minds. Any kind of medium length joe job or dictionary attack will take it down. Exchange isn't the only one. An ISP I used to work for used IMail for Windows as its primary client mail server, and it too was susceptible to these attacks. We played around with a lot of parameters before we went to a Postfix-Exchange gateway. The irony was at the time we were running our Windows servers are state-of-the-art (for the time) Pentium IVs, and both Exchange and IMail could easily be overwhelmed by dictionary attacks, to the point where the two Windows servers would become hopelessly unresponsive. I built a Postfix server running on top of Linux on an old Pentium II with 256mb of RAM, and had it feed to Exchange and IMail, and that little bastard just couldn't be brought down. In part I suspect that it was the crappy databases that Exchange and IMail used, which could be overwhelmed by a large number of queries, but in part I really do suspect that Windows Server's TCP/IP layer just isn't as resilient as Linux's or BSD's.
At any rate, building a Postfix gateway from a fresh FreeBSD or Debian install takes about an hour or two, you can throw stuff like SpamAssassin on there, and it works great.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As a network/systems administrator, Windows has little to no use left on the desktop any longer.
Compared to alternatives (and there are many!) common Windows machines on the desktops are costly and relatively expensive to maintain (in terms of manpower and infrastructure): you've got complex SUS arrangements (due to in-house app compatibility, usually), AD (same reasons, as well as work flow) and malware contentions - just for starters. Compare that to pointing all workstations at (say) a local Ubuntu LTS repository cache or updating from Apple. A lot can be said about Windows ACLs and its other underpinnings, but keeping things secure while allowing users to work is not one of them.
Additionally, the time and (domain) knowledge required to roll a minimalist Linux distro vs. a minimalist, locked-down Windows install (ie a 'thinclient image') is significantly different. With one, you've got a maintainable minimalist system that uses negligible resources to update; the other is pretty much a custom hack which will require significant efforts to update. I'll let you figure which is which.
The average user uses no more than 3 or 4 applications in a large environment, from what I've seen. There aren't many people who multi-role: they've got their own world and aside from a web browser, might touch one or two apps on a given day. For these apps, you've got things like Citrix Presentation Server or Windows Server 2008 remote applications. Centralize the common stuff when you can, so it's easier to maintain, update, etc.
As for Google, my experience has been (with the technical crowd) that those actually developing for Open Source type environments, having your development environment be similar to your production environment is a wee bit helpful. Aside form things like Picasa, I can't see much of a need for Windows; indeed, there's likely not even a preference for Windows at Google, short of the occasional mathematician. The yuppie post-graduate degreed geek seems to prefer Apple.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Kernel aside, Windows 7 still has tremendous amounts of Legacy kruft behind it. The Registry is still just about the least secure and safe idea ever. NTFS is badly in need of modernization. The hardcoded folder hierarchies that underlie how Windows 7 handles files is amazingly archaic. I remember renaming and moving folders around willy-nilly in OS7 in 92. 18 years later, renaming a folder in Windows is just begging everything to break. They're up to about 60 control panels, since they can't re-organize any of them for fear of breaking other dependencies. When sharing a folder in Windows 7 you can share as a network folder share, a Windows Media share, or specific group shares, all with separate interaction points and methods. And have you looked through the Windows->System32 folder recently? Or how shortcuts are STILL handled?
Windows is a hugely bloated with old kruft that is holding it back from being as intelligent, usable, or spry as it could be. When Apple switched from OS9 to OSX, they wrote a compatibility layer that pretended to be OS9 within the new structure that they were creating. They created a little sandbox for the old stuff to play in, while they end-of-lifed it. Microsoft has traditionally added to their existing structures, so as not to break true backwards compatibility with old software. This can be fortunate... I recently had to replace a dying 386, and the software from the mid 80's ran fine on a new Vista machine. But at the same time this means fundamental properties of the operating system remain badly dated. Even small things like how the operating system handles changing icons remains the same terrible implementation that Windows 95 had.
The ______ Agenda
Actually, since all platforms are hacked at the conference, it shows that the Mac is the biggest prize.
More to the point, the weakness exploited was in Safari (in all but one case) and required user intervention in all cases. For Windows, systems were compromised in ways requiring no user interaction.
So it does actually show that a Mac is harder to "pwn". It's not like the time of pwn2own means anything--the hackers have all prepared their exploits and practiced them for months in advance.