02.06.08
The Windows Security Lie and the ‘Civil War’ Against Torvalds
Friendly fire, coincidence, or blood-hungry journalists?
Three weeks ago, amid tremendous amount of security FUD from Microsoft, we exposed the many lies. Recently we posted another quick update. It was just a couple of days ago as a matter of fact. Now we come to discover that the same tricks are being pulled yet again. Microsoft patches its software silently, for undeserved vanity purposes.
Vista SP1 will contain undocumented fixes
Interesting email in today mailbag: “Will SP1 contain undisclosed or undocumented security fixes?”
For some people, counting the number of security flaws that one OS has compared to another is important because it offers a metric upon which to determine which OS is the most secure (personally, I feel that it’s a bogus metric, but I’ll let it slide for now). However, many claim that Microsoft stacks the deck in its favor by not disclosing a full list of vulnerabilities that have been patched by omitting to include those discovered and patched in-house.
Speaking of security, remember Microsoft’s ActiveX menace, whose main purpose was to exclude rival Web browsers from the market at the expense of security? Well, it appears to be getting the boot at the government.
The federal agency’s warning to disable all Internet Explorer ActiveX controls might as well be recommendation to use Firefox—or Opera or Safari. Hey, AOL, are you sure about pulling the plug on Netscape?
It’s time for the Federal government to look more closely at ‘ActiveX 2.0′, better known as Silverlight [1, 2]. Some States have already warned about this.
In other security news, Linux gets sort of ‘invited’ to the Mac hack contest. To give you an idea of what’s involved:
Last year, security researcher Dino Dai Zovi spent a sleepless night hacking his Mac in order to take the prize at the show’s first PWN to OWN contest. Dai Zovi found a QuickTime bug that allowed him to run unauthorized software on the Mac once the computer’s browser was directed to a specially crafted Web page.
At the moment, there is tension between Mac users and Linux. A questionably tactless remark from Linus Torvalds (about Mac OS X’s filesystem) has already been taken out of context and it used against him in the press. Journalists are implying — if not explicitly saying — that he attacked Leopard or OS X as a whole. The press incites Apple Mac users against him and responses include:
Matt Asay: the Linux desktop is ‘utter crap’
This is a follow-up to a headline which said something along the lines of:
Linus Torvalds: Mac OS X is ‘utter crap’
Of course, Linus Torvalds never said this, but they shove words down his throat for drama and hostility. See the previous post about creating civil wars (UNIX versus Linux in this case), be aware that Microsoft owns a lot of the press (literally) and recall the recent Brett Winterford incident (attacking IBM in the press after a free trip to Redmond). █
