Tag: windows

Klaxon

Seems the new game in town is to adopt a klaxon approach to security.

Subject: Important Security Update for the .NET Messenger Service
Date: 19 Aug 2003 02:23:18 -0700
From: .NET Messenger Service Staff dot_net_msgr_svc@msgr.hotmail.com
ATTENTION: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED FOR MSN AND WINDOWS MESSENGER USERS.

I got that email 1113 times so far. Of course, that number is laughable compared to the 10s of emails I got from the SoBig virus today. It seems no day passes without a Microsoft incident.

Microsoft Security

Security is the new number 1 concern for Microsoft. The repercussions of this are still some time off, but the Windows is insecure jokers will have to look elsewhere for amusement. Security has so far been the domain of anal-retentive folks, and was not exactly hot. Maybe we can finally move away from crappy pointer-based languages? Yeah, one can hope.
2003-08-23: Very interesting perspective on the security of DCOM after last week’s worms:

Microsoft has made some pretty strong claims about the improved security of our products as a result of these changes. And then the DCOM issues come to light. Unfortunately, it’s still going to be a long time before all our code is as clean as it needs to be.
Some of the code we reviewed in the DCOM stack had comments about DGROUP consolidation (remember that precious 64KB segment prior to 32-bit flat mode?) and OS/2 2.0 changes. Some of these source files contain comments from the 80s. I thought that Win95 was ancient!

2004-02-17: You’ve got to hand it to these guys that they have sense of humor.

2004-06-24: Turns out Microsoft really means it this time. I had an older SQL Server 2000 running that stopped working after the update. Turns out XP detected the missing service packs for MSSQL and disabled TCP access on the default MSSQL port. Commendable, although the error message could have been displayed more prominently (maybe as part of the new security center)
2007-11-30: Microsoft continues its old lies about security. Why do they bother? Their products have become better, why piss into their own well?

Do people in charge of security strategy at Microsoft really believe that aggressively concealing the count of fixes that do make it out makes a product more secure? Shouldn’t they be trying to fix more bugs, rather than writing reports that would “punish” them for actively improving the security of their users rather than hoping that defects aren’t found by someone who they can’t keep quiet?

Linux on the desktop

Some Open Source advocates are serious when they suggest that Gnumeric is a valid Excel contender, or that the Gnome Desktop “is just as easy to use as the Windows Desktop”. These people suffer from their very own reality distortion field, as Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux, points out:

I recall a discussion (not on this list) some time ago where a group of people were arguing that Gnumeric was a replacement for Excel. I was appalled. They were arguing about Excel vs. Gnumeric features. They were arguing about reading and writing Excel file formats. They didn’t understand why Excel users complained when they tried to use Gnumeric. The prevailing opinions were that users were just not willing to learn to use something different.

I finally asked the question, “Can Gnumeric do pivot tables?” I go the response, “What’s a pivot table?” My point was proven. The Gnumeric advocates didn’t even understand the technology they were trying to replace. I can hand an Office power user an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of names and addresses, and with a few point and click operations, out come pages of stick-on mailing labels. How do you do that with Gnumeric? I’m willing to bet that few or none of us on this mailing list have that level of proficiency with MS Office or Excel. If we don’t know what it can do, and we don’t know what people do with it, how can we replace it?

2002-12-12: Arrgh. I now remember why I made the conscious decision in 2000 to no longer run Linux on the Desktop. It’s just a waste of time to get all the silly library dependencies to work. Decided to give it a try at the office over VNC, such as to not have to screw up my machine. Turns out I have to spend a day resolving install problems and other shit, not exactly what I consider relevant activities. I will gladly leave that field to slackers that want to feel leet. I will likely export my sources over samba so that I can work on them from Windows 2000 using Eclipse.
2008-01-03: Hopefully, 2008 is the year of online apps, instead. having spent a day to decrapify a XP machine this holiday, it was refreshing to see how much non-savvy users like some online apps.

I think that was it, though. Everything else “just worked,” including opening all their Microsoft Office documents — word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations — in OpenOffice.org, connecting to their wireless network (served by an Apple Airport Express, natch), and of course playing Mahjongg (part of gnome-games). I know the wireless thing isn’t a fair test, since I’d already thoroughly tested their hardware for Linux compatibility and had been running Debian on it for 18 months. Still — different Distro, clean install, no driver problems. Thanks, Canonical (and Debian, and all the upstream driver hackers). And thanks to Sun and others for reverse-engineering Microsoft’s proprietary formats and building a free office suite that even my mother could love. Kudos all around. 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop. My parents’ desktop.

2008-01-30: Best troll of recent memory

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me. It’s just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of Windows. Not possible. I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.