Vista Security Discussions Get a Rocky Start

narramissic writes "A technical glitch Thursday morning prevented many security vendors from participating in the first online discussion regarding Microsoft's plans for opening up the Vista kernel, ITworld reports. In a blog posting on the subject, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Stephen Toulouse wrote, 'We had a glitch where we sent out a messed up link. ... We're very sorry about that, it certainly was not intentional and we definitely see that was not a good thing for people to experience on such an important topic.'"

Re:"Accidents" happen... all too frequently

[dpbsmith]

A participant (or non-participant, as it turned out), Alex Eckelberry, said [blogspot.com] "someone at Microsoft accidently sent out the LiveMeeting presentation invites as "presenter", which if you've ever used LiveMeeting, is an invitation to chaos. Realizing their error, the meeting was rescheduled for 30 minutes later, and that didn't all come together, because the meeting had been originally setup to end at 12:30, so we were promptly all kicked off."

So, the system design makes it easy to make a mistake that is an "invitation to chaos," and even though it was quickly caught, the system design either didn't have an easy way to change the end of the meeting, or made it easy to overlook the fact that everyone was going to get "promptly kicked off."

Even if it had been a typo in the URL, that would have said that something in the system design made it easier for a user to re-key a URL by hand than to copy it.