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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
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.
On other news, RedHat announced it does not use Windows on its web servers and Apple announced that no employees use Windows Mobile phones.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.