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Microsoft 'Trustworthy Computing' Turns 10
gManZboy writes "Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and 'Anna Kournikova.' The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company's 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. 'TWC Next' will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says."
To rebut specifically:
1) While most users do not need admin access and by default Vista and 7 do not give it to you, I still see people assigning admin rights to themselves and deactivating UAC as a prerequisite to using the computer, which puts the lie to your top two paragraphs. Once they take those two steps, the machine might as well be XP. They actually do it for (to them) legitimate reasons - software related and habit being the two largest.
2) IE9 still runs any script presented to it that passes a very crude ruleset based on zones. You Microsoft shills (sorry, that's how you come off) always try to compare Firefox without plugins with IE. IE has no facility for blocking scripts and flash selectively that doesn't cost more than a browser is worth. Noscript and ABP are a few mouse clicks away. You can have all the sandboxing in the world, but not letting the script run in the first place is the only effective defense against drive-by malware installs.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not the same person as the poster. Sorry.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Windows 7 is great. I just hit the Windows key and type the file or program I want. It is nice if you forget the name of the file but remember something like sales figures for 2009 and it will display them for you. I go nuts on XP and feel crippled without it. I never go into the program menu at all.
I did not like the libraries feature at first and grown to like. On my desktop I have an admin account called God and the other one is my limited user account. I can just use public documents to share files back and forth. On my laptop with Windows 7 I can view them with homegroup too.
The libraries thing is for sharing very easily and it is nice. Windows 7 is a decent OS actually and a real upgrade from XP for those who get frustrated it is not identical to XP and feel XP is fine even though it is approaching 11 years old.
http://saveie6.com/
How did this get marked insightful? Boy the geeks treating corps like ballclubs just gets worse by the quarter, don't it?
As for how Win 7 is better, as someone who has been working on the things since before there even was a Windows let me count the ways. 1.-ASLR makes it damn hard to use buffer overflows. 2.-DEP keeps software from writing in non executable locations, again helping kill buffer overflows dead. the fact that before 7 I'd see a hell of a lot of buffer overflow exploits and now its all social engineering tells me a lot. 3.- Both IE and Chromium based browsers by default are in low rights mode, which is even lower than a *nix standard user, this helps kill drivebys dead and is why I no longer recommend Firefox because it doesn't support this security feature even after being introduced FIVE years ago. 4.-Action center which creates a "one stop shop" for security and by default reminds the user they need to have a scheduled backup plan which brings me to 5.- Windows backup being image based now makes it MUCH easier for the user to have a solid backup plan in place that will actually restore the machine even on drive failure. It also by default includes the folders most used by people to store their important data like My Docs, pictures, and their music folders.
Now as for the non security features we have 1.-Jumplists, how in the hell did we live without these? these are the best damned thing since the DVD burner as far as I'm concerned, when I want to get back to what I was working on yesterday just right click on Explorer and BAM! my folders are back up, right click on Dragon and BAM! all my websites are back up, its just too damned quick. 2.-Breadcrumbs, man i love the breadcrumbs because when you have a file and folder setup several level deep breadcrumbs make navigation fast fast fast. 3.-Superfetch, with RAM so cheap Superfetch can really give Windows a hell of a speed boost along with ALL your apps. the longer you run the system the smarter it gets thanks to its DB of usage patterns so it knows for example that between 9-5 I'm gonna be running Dragon and after 5 I'm firing up WMP to play my music so BAM! Its already loaded into RAM and ready. With 8Gb of RAM I even have the core files of my current favorite games loaded into cache so when I fire up Just Cause II BAM! there it is, that's damned nice. 4.- Readyboost when combined with Superfetch gives a hell of a speedboost to mobile devices like laptops and netbooks. not so much desktops as you have fast RPM drives there and fatter caches but on a netbook you can pop a fast cheap SD card into the card reader and just leave it there and it really makes you apps load quick.
Now I could probably name off a good two dozen more of each but do I really have to AC? There are plenty of things to bitch at MSFT about, like Vista being rushed with serious bugs, their mobile strategy is pretty much "Ape Apple" but Windows 7 ain't one of them. I've converted just about all my customers to Win 7 and to a man I've not had a single complaint about 7, in fact most ended up buying the family packs later just so they could get rid of XP completely. Once you've used the new features in 7 going back to XP feels like Win98, its THAT backwards.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Besides, 32-bit Windows 7 can and does run 16-bit DOS applications.
No it cannot, try running something like kknd, syndicate wars or the like on 32-bit windows 7, it won't even try to start up let alone work properly.
Things like that need proper dos (or an emulated environment like dosbox, or a VM with dos on it), which no version of windows has supplied since windows ME.
As for running ppc apps while having lion installed, here provides a few solutions. Mostly it is either virtualization or dual booting.
But hey, dual booting win98/win2k or win98/winXP was how people remedied wanting to play their dos games too, and you've already said that work-arounds such as dos box and virtualization are acceptable.