> company’s co-founder, Bill Gates, once ordered all of Microsoft engineers to stop writing new code for a month Source?
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Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#62"Still, episodes of online hacking have become even more startling, including the theft of personal data from millions of Target customers and terabytes of private emails from Sony Pictures Entertainment (and both companies use some Microsoft products)." So somewhere in Sony and Target's organisations there are one or more Windows computers? This is just lazy reporting NYT. Do better.
Agreed - I bet they use Google search every day and their execs have iPhones too.
Of mild interest, in the Sony hack: "The hack, which was launched Nov. 24, only affected computers with Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Windows software, so Sony employees using Apple Inc (AAPL.O) Macs, including many in the marketing department, had not been affected." IMHO Microsoft still have a fairly ho hum attitude. If you want to hack a company like Sony the easiest way is to target employees still using old systems like XP and they could have mopped a lot of that up by offering free upgrades to 10 when they offered them to users of 7 and 8 but nah.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vista was a major security redesign, not just bug fixes. UAC was one of the biggest security improvements in the OS, because it meant that users were no longer running as admin by default.
And judging by the pageviews on my blogpost on how to disable it, users didn't really like it very much...
Which was caused in part by badly behaving programs (writing user data to the Program Files directory) that triggered the UAC prompt, if I'm not mistaken.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#64> company’s co-founder, Bill Gates, once ordered all of Microsoft engineers to stop writing new code for a month Source?
This is the closest reference I could find. http://www.cnet.com/news/gates-security-is-top-priority/
I don't have Microsoft source though.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - I bet they use Google search every day and their execs have iPhones too.
Of mild interest, in the Sony hack: "The hack, which was launched Nov. 24, only affected computers with Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Windows software, so Sony employees using Apple Inc (AAPL.O) Macs, including many in the marketing department, had not been affected." IMHO Microsoft still have a fairly ho hum attitude. If you want to hack a company like Sony the easiest way is to target employees still using old systems…
By the time of the Sony hack, any machine still using XP is a machine that would be using XP even if Microsoft did exactly what you suggest. There's been no lack of opportunities to upgrade and the cost of a Windows license is generally trivial next to the labor expense, training expense, and monetized risk of "my critical software doesn't work" of the upgrade of these systems.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tellingly, Google's security efforts were also a top-down reaction to a major security incident. What was that? All I can think of is when the chinese stole their source code but the response to that would presumably be more about managing who has access to what internally than improving the security of their user facing products. edit: to be clear I'm thinking of the time they had code stolen by a chinese employee…
Yes, I think that was the first event that pushed Google to focus much more on security. The second one was of course in the summer of Snowden, when Google found out NSA had full access to its network. Since then it has taken quite a few measures to improve security and now it treats its own network as the "untrusted Internet". https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/enterprise-architec... Unfortunately, other than…
Cite a source that demonstrates that NSA had full access to Google's network, please.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of great people at Apple and the security model of iOS is an achievement --- in a lot of practical ways better than that of Android. But I do not know a lot of people who would argue the Apple has a better security program than Google does. Google's team is better funded and better staffed, and has a much broader charter than Apple's.
> in a lot of practical ways better than that of Android. Umm no - the update situation is better on iOS but fundamentally iOS has bigger problems - https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/532?autostart=fa... . That problem is unfixable easily due to the way ObjC works. Android gets code access control for free with Java. There have always been Jailbreaks for most iOS versions and it's not like they haven't had o…
I don't understand what your argument is. Untethered jailbreaks on iOS are worth gigantic amounts of money because they are not easy to come by.
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
For $3 you could get StartIsBack and you would never know the Start menu had changed since Windows 7, or the nature of the desktop vs. the tiles screen. That made Windows 8 work just fine for me.
For free, you can use ClassicShell. I actually forget I'm on Windows 8.1 at home vs Windows 7 at work as they're almost identical.
Or update to 10 for free too?
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How are you ever going to assess the quality of this software in terms of security? I am not aware of a single third party that has reviewed all of the code that goes into a Linux distribution. Do you know of one?
Not sure what Linux has to do with my comment. Are you assuming I use a Linux "distribution"? Sometimes I have done so, but only occasionally when I need to check something on Linux. Anyway, I am missing your point.
You're not sure what the most popular open-source OS has to do with your comment about open source OSes?
Re: Microsoft, Once Infested with Security Flaws, Does an About-Face
#70Microsoft, after much R&D work, deployed two technologies in Windows 7 that improved the security situation considerably. The first was the Static Driver Verifier.[1] That's the formal proof-of-correctness system that checks the source code for a driver for termination, bad pointers, incorrect API calls, and anything that could result in a kernel crash. It's a symbolic path tracer - it symbolically executes all paths through the code. All drivers must pass that verifier. Before this was deployed, about half of Windows crashes were due to drivers. Now, very few are.
The other technology was a classifier for panic dumps. When Windows crashes and reports data to Microsoft, that data goes into a classifier system which tries to cluster similar crashes together. So, when there's a crash bug, the reports of similar crashes are all looked at by the same person at the same time, which tends to get it fixed.
Linux lacks either technology, which is a problem.
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...