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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.
The year of Linux on...
Never mind.
.....if Microsoft employees can ditch Google.
That will be the true test of Google's influence.
Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google.
Your friend,
Steve Ballmer
I recently left IBM, but while I was there, there was considerable effort to eliminate M$ products. Symphony was being pushed out over MS Office, and Apple netbooks were an available option in some areas. Obviously IBM has a love for Linux, and the Linux folk there are doing everything they can to make it perfectly acceptable, and usable, to use Linux internally. For all of my 4 years at IBM I used Debian and then Ubuntu on my work thinkpad (but I kept a XP partition for Visio).
They probably use this one.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
I thought the next big thing to hit MS by Google actions was to make HTML5 the new YouTube installer(apart from the beta html5). This would represent the next most significant milestone over the inception of Google Search itself.
But this is up there. For Joe and Jane Public, google is hip, trustworthy, and useful everyday.
Perhaps more than any other effort, this may influence significantly the perception of school aged people and Operating Systems. When that tipping point comes, MS is in serious trouble.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Google makes its own mobile platform (Android) and is working on another for general computing (Google Web OS), so it only makes sense that they'd move away from a closed, proprietary platform like Windows. If there are any Mac OS X machines, I'd imagine those are being migrated to something else as well... though some people may get clearance for software like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro.
Even for testing/development, they can just run virtual machines.
http://www.tenjou.net/
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 only more susceptible to spearfishing because the monitor and body are one. Ram a spear through that and the whole machine is gone. With most windows machines, spearfishers go for the bright monitor but since the real guts of the machine is in a seperate body, it just requires replacing an ever-cheaper monitor.
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.
--
On other news, RedHat announced it does not use Windows on its web servers and Apple announced that no employees use Windows Mobile phones.
Except OS X isn't more secure. That's why it's always the first gone at pwn2own competitions.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
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.
Sorry if this is trollish, but Macs are IMO a WORSE security risk than Windows when dealing with spearphishing and other forms of targeted attacks.
Why do you think this?
From an overall security standpoint, you have:
No open ports by default.
Users who do not run as admin to run any software
Now consider targeted attacks as you mentioned. You start out with a more secure base that makes it harder to infect the system beyond a simple cleaning. Now if you are really concerned about security, what do you do?
Simple, you access all email and do all browsing through Chrome.
Why do you think Google would not do this? They could say "don't use Safari or Mail,app" and then they base all the use of the computers that spearphishing could come in on, in a platform they control and that they can update every day if they like. I'm sure they use gmail internally so it's not like that's even a switch.
They key is basing that all on a subsystem more resistant to attack to add to the layers of security. And the simple reality is, that currently there just are not a million exploits in the wild showing you how to infect a Mac like there are for Windows today. That alone makes it REALISTICALLY more secure, even if the platform still has vulnerabilities (which it obviously does since all software does).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's because the hackers want a Mac, not some lame old Windows box.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Macs have been offered at Google all along - all that appears to have changed here is the elimination of Windows as an option.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
It's first gone at pwn2own competitions because it's what people want to own. Duh!
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."
Every OS reaches an end point, not necessarily driven by only one thing.
Apple reached the end with the Apple II, Mac OS9, and moved to UNIX.
How is Microsoft going to break the legacy trail?
They are going to throw a chair through all the Windows, maybe?
How do you get rid of entrenched dispersed foe that attacks everything you do from inside your own OS?
How many tens of millions of user hours are wasted every year on WinPCs just with the security stuff, which still is NEVER enough?
My Guess: Never. They will Bleed Windows until competitors take their market share as users make the choice to abandon Windows.
It is truly a strange situation where the dominant player is also the most attacked and yet in the last 5 years nothing in security seems to change.
This is the Financial Times, not the New York Post, Mac OS Rumors, or some random blog. This reminds me of when the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Apple was going to Intel, and Slashdot said, "Never going to happen." Of course, it did happen. Folks, when a major newspaper like the FT, WSJ, or New York Times reports something, it's probably true. Which makes this very interesting. I think the most interesting aspect will probably be that feature parity for things like Google Chrome will probably benefit--no longer will Chrome, or Google Toolbar, or Google Earth lag behind on Linux and Mac, because Google employees are using Linux or Macs, because now Google employees will be using Linux and Macs.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
So Google employees don't use the client software they themselves produce, considering that a lot of it is still Windows-only?
I would be particularly curious about Google's own GTalk client...
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
Update: Apparently it was just Ballmer who ditched use of Google in 2004.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
OS X has all the nice overflows, poor to no memory protection, problems with users ect that most consumer quality OS face.
Actually not really. It's not as prone to buffer overruns as C++ or C would be, thanks to Objective-C used to write most apps.
Also with Snow Leopard, it has fairly good memory protection at this point.
And the users are more partitioned off, because there are no programs that demand you run as admin the way you find Windows programs that flake out... not to mention no open ports by default.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, the number of unnecessary and undesirable services automatically deployed with Windows operating systems is quite profound. The automatic sharing of the C: drive as \\hostname\c$\, for example, has been nearly impossible to turn off for even a competent systems administrator without ripping out parts of the operating system you may want.
Shall we review the security risks of the almost mandatory use of dynamic DNS associated with Active Directory? Or the very poor security models of overburdening the Kerberos server underlying Active Directory with graphical and non-security related tools which have _nothing_ to do with that absolutely critical security service, yet are mandatory with the Windows "Server" releases required to run an Active Directory server? Or the denial of service attacks possible against an Internet-exposed Exchange server because it simply cannot handle a reasonable amount of direct SMTP traffic, especially broadly distributed spambots?
The Linux boxes simply do not run all these services and have all these vulnerabilities when they come out of the box because they don't _activate_ such services without giving the owner a patch to patch their systems. And users are not forced to run "Internet Explorer", that festering cesspool of security vulnerabilities, because someone locked the software update mechanism to a web browser with too many "features" to possibly secure.
It has always surprised me how few companies run linux on the desktop. I have personal converted about 30 in the last 10 years, all of which were mom and pop places with less than 100 seats. Google using Chrome would not surprise me. 90% of the office desktop users dont need more than a browser, office platform, and maybe e-mail assuming the company does not have a web based e-mail. I have heard many geeks say it is not ready for the desktop based on a list of reasons but the general office user has such a small software need that it fits nicely..
The last company I migrated over to linux was a rush job. They needed it done in a short window before the inspection of there licences. I set up 1 server with home directory shares in both NFS and Samba, ldap, dns, printers, and DHCP. There were 3 desktop configs, 1) for users that had with firefox, OpenOffice, and google chat. 2) for managers that had that plus planner, and Dia. 3) was for upper management that had everything from the first two plus a few specialized things that one VP seemed to think he needed like bit torrent and an RSS feed reader.
Everyone got the basics like a calculator, archive manager, Notepad, etc.
All in all they run smooth, easy access to pen drives etc. Windows Laptops could be pointed at the server and after logging in would get the users home directory allowing them to easily move data between there laptop and the desktop. The remote home directories and ldap logins meant that users could login at any desktop and do there work. All the desktops were the same for a given group so if one failed it was simply replaced and a new image installed (Totalling about 45 min install time) Top this off with no viruses, spy ware, or bot software and the desktops were locked down with only a couple of open ports. So far every company I have done this for has loved the setup.
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.
I wonder what Google uses for an accounting package?
Very hard to find accounting programs that do not require Windows OS.
That doesn't really make sense. We are just reaching a point in time when Google realizes that Apple is a bigger threat to their business then Windows ever was (Windows users have the option of installing alternate codecs, browser, toolbars, etc), and Windows has finally got its security act together, and NOW Google is going to switch from Windows to Mac?
"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!
"Remember, the system that was compromised at Google was an XP system running IE6 and logged in as administrator. IOW, they made no serious attempt to secure it."
As a developer, the only way to use is XP is as a full admin. Otherwise you cannot do anything. This is due to the primitive security model of the OS.
You can run as a normal user on *nix and mac and use sudo to perform "dangerous" operations. Windows XP has no such thing, and UAC on Vista is worthless.
blah blah blah
if you need more proof i am writing to you on a 400 hertz computer
I'm sorry, but the credibility of you as a computer user just went right out the window.
This makes me curious from a desktop administration perspective. Windows, for all its problems, has a great ecosystem of enterprise management tools for things like software installation and inventory, hardware inventory, health monitoring and more. All the stuff you need to effectively manage a large fleet of workstations with a few techs is available.
Most developers I know make poor system administrators, so it's hard to believe they take a completely laissez-faire approach to desktop management. Also, Google Docs seems like a really poor substitute for file shares on an enterprise NOS and directory service -- it's the "cloud" equivalent of a peer-to-peer LAN network when it comes to security structures.
That explains why they have no clue about whats going on.
No sir I dont like it.
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
I dunno, I think this whole "internet" thing is kind of overhyped, at this point. It's clearly peaked in the marketplace, and public opinion is already starting to turn against it. This time next year, your precious little Internet darling is gonna be so irrelevant that it'll make Vanilla Ice look like Joel Spolsky.
And yet the Pwn2Own competitions keep showing that Macs aren't hard to hack...
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Windows has run-as. You can run programs as another user account without logging off. Create an administrative account and use run-as only when running the programs that need it. This is close enough to sudo to be useful.
As a developer I have done this; except in the reverse. IT wasn't flexible with domain user accounts so I ended up having an administrator account and used run-as to a local limited user. I did that to test that my code would work with minimal privileges.
Windows doesn't do anything to encourage this sort of thing but it certainly is possible if you care about security.
windows key + r /u:domain\user application.exe
runas
return or enter key
when prompted enter your password
use a- prefix accounts within a group on the domain for local administrator access.
use normal accounts for login and day to day.
I don't care about the OS "fighting" but make sure you look at all the details first.
The automatic sharing of the C: drive as \\hostname\c$\, for example, has been nearly impossible to turn off for even a competent systems administrator without ripping out parts of the operating system you may want.
have to disagree, most competent admins know how to search knowlegde base articles. Took all of about 8 seconds to find the KB articles that describe the registry settings in detail. eg. heres the windows 2003 one. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816524
Or the denial of service attacks possible against an Internet-exposed Exchange server because it simply cannot handle a reasonable amount of direct SMTP traffic, especially broadly distributed spambots?
That is so true. Our Exchange server was falling over at least a couple times a week, even though it was on a fresh install on good hardware and run by a competent admin. It just couldn't stand up to all the dictionary attacks and other jackassery thrown at it. I installed a FreeBSD+Postfix server in front of the Exchange server and configured it to learn which usernames were valid on the Exchange, set up Spamassassin, and let it go. We literally haven't had a single unplanned outage on Exchange since that day.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Perhaps it's easier to find a exploit for a Mac then Windows, there just aren't enough Mac's in the world to make developing one worthwhile outside a competition.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I have spoken with 4 Google employees, all who have given the same information.
They are moving to Mac or Linux, employee's option.
Exceptions are only given on a case-by-case basis.
Bullshit. I do a great deal of C/C++, R, C# development on XP and very, very rarely need to run anything as administrator. I can't even remember the last time I had to runas Admin other than installing software.
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.
All security is through obscurity to some extent. Encryption, passwords etc.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
That's because the hackers want a Mac, not some lame old Windows box.
Sorry, but the contestants do not decide the order in which they attack the target computers. They are allocated timeslots randomly to each system. The Mac fails first because they haven't implemented some of the basic security precautions that the other operating systems have.
You can right click on any app in XP and choose "Run As". Same as sudo.
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
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.
Even it were true (and it isn't), it doesn't demonstrate anything of the sort.
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.
Just like Windows NT, you mean ?
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.
Please detail the "superior design". You might also want to comment on how OSX has consistently lost out to Windows (and everything else) in contests like pwn2own.
A long time linux user, I sent in a resume to google HR in India and they
replied asking me to resend in MS Doc format!
Unpatched 5% (11 of 217 Secunia advisories)
That's the important part. Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source, a process which leads to a more secure system -- wouldn't you rather have a vulnerability found and fixed, or even found and marked "unpatched" on Securina, than found and exploited (hidden) elsewhere?
And even more important is what those unpatched vulnerabilities actually are:
A vulnerability has been reported in the Linux Kernel, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).
This is in the CIFS code, which presumably can be disabled. Should be fixed, but how many Linux systems actually need to defend themselves against local DoS attacks?
Tony Griffiths has reported a vulnerability in the Linux Kernel, which can be exploited malicious, local users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).
Another local DoS. And another, and another... Yawn. Let's skip to the good stuff:
An error in the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers due to insufficient DMA lock checking can be exploited to crash the X server or modify video output.
Modifying video output could be very bad, but also very hard to exploit in a way to make it worse than rickrolling you. And again, local.
A race condition within the handling of "/proc/.../cmdline" may disclose the content of environment variables of spawning processes.
In other words, there's a race condition (hard to exploit) which may disclose sensitive information in your environment variables to other procesess you run. I honestly can't think of a single case where this would reveal anything exploitable. Clearly, it should be fixed, but right now, you're welcome to my environment variables.
A race condition within the memory management can be exploited to disclose the content of random physical memory pages.
That could be very, very bad, but also very difficult to exploit. Again, local.
The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error within the ide-cd SG_IO functionality. This allows a user with read-only access to bypass these permissions and perform write and erase operations on media in a drive.
So, in other words, anyone who uses an IDE CD-RW drive is vulnerable. Otherwise, you need a lightning-quick exploit to grab someone's blank media and burn something evil to it. I'm quaking in my boots.
The problem is caused due to signedness errors which can lead to integer overflows in the XDR decode functions in kNFSd. This can be exploited by sending packets with a write request larger than 2^31, causing the system to crash.
In other words, doesn't affect people who don't run NFS, or specifically kernel NFS (there's a userland NFS now). Oh, and you need to be on the local network.
Various functions in the IEEE 1394 driver contain integer overflows within the memory allocation scheme. This can potentially be exploited via specially crafted requests, which may cause a large amount of data to be copied into an insufficiently sized buffer.
That's probably the most serious one I've seen -- possible privilege escalation -- but what privileges do I have to have to access the raw FireWire device anyway? I bet most users can't.
So that brings it down to, what, one actually unpatched vulnerability that I'd be worried about. And it's still only local, and still a bitch to exploit.
Now let's try the Windows ones. One is a remote exploit, which can be triggered merely by convincing an Aero user to view a given image. Another is a remote exploit which may allow people to manipulate SSL-encrypted streams.
Security is not and never has been about numbers -- I only need one serious exploit.
Also worth
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Very few Windows programs require admin privs to run after install. There are no open ports by default on Windows Vista +
Also, the certificates make it easier to know if anything wanting elevation is likely to be safe not; Windows will advise as appropriate.
Finally, Mac OS doesn't have a full ASLR implementation; and their NX implementation only works on 64 applications.
http://www.laconicsecurity.com/aslr-leopard-versus-vista.html
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
We'll see how long it takes Google to start frantically doing the back-stroke.
I don't think we will see Google doing a backstroke anytime soon. When you think about how badly Google was compromised, and what someone could do to them if they are every compromised like that again. What are their options.
1. Find a way to live without Microsoft and all the software that will ONLY run in a MS Environment.
or
2. Give to it, take the easy way, run MS software and just expect that you can survive any system breach no matter how badly you are compromised.
If it takes 5 years and a billion dollars, I am sure it will be worth it to Google in the long run. Also note. Google is not "talking" about switching. They are not trying to get a better price from Microsoft. They just quietly started to mandate that MS is not an option any longer.
vi +
The same way other companies do it...
We have no production windows systems, no windows systems which are used for day to day tasks...
What we do have, is a small handful of windows systems (mostly virtual machines) sitting in an isolated test network which are used purely for testing purposes and windows-specific development.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
They keep the polar bears from eating my sandwiches :(
How is objective-c any less prone to a buffer overrun than C++?
Because more strings are likely to be C null-terminated strings in a C++ program, where pretty much every string in an Objective-C application will be an NSString.
Yes I know C++ also has string collection classes, they just aren't used with as much consistency.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley