Windows Chief Suggests Vista Won't Need Antivirus

LadyDarth writes "During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed."

I've used XP SP2 without AV for years

[patio11]

Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.

Now I'm using IE7 as my main browser (quiet!) and don't anticipate any problems with it, either. Heck, its *more* paranoid than FF is some of the time (it will quibble about http refresh redirects to executables, for example).

I remember....

[Bing Tsher E]

....when they announced that Windows 2000 would never have a Service Pack release. One would never be needed.

(still have no use for XP, btw.)

@LiquidCoooled, about zombies

[Toveling]

Windows Vista severly limits access to raw packet sending to non-priviledged apps, meaning that packet forging is much more difficult. Although the zombies that are sending seemingly alright content (at the protocol level) aren't affected, those that are doing the SYN/ACK DDOS floods will be.

Hmm, and where have we heard this before

[rimcrazy]

Yea..........and 640K will be plenty of memory..........
And the world will only need 4 computers...................
And no one would ever need a computer at home..............

Sheesh......where do they come up with this stuff?

Take the Apple Challenge

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Take the Apple Challenge: Put a Vista machine one the Net, and IIRC, make sure a telent daemon and web server are also running and give out the admin password. If nobody can crack it, we'll believe you, otherwise STFU.

And XP has no buffer overflows...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Here's the same guy's promise about their last operating system:

Microsoft has said it has stamped out buffer overflows with the upcoming release of Windows XP. Jim Allchin, vice president, claimed the company has done a complete code review of its operating system and removed all buffers which could overflow. [vnunet.com]

I'll let somebody else post a list of all the critical updates caused by buffer overflows...

Re:I've used XP SP2 without AV for years

[clymere]

Just because you haven't had a problem doesn't mean you're not one for someone else. If you havent run scans, how do you know you're not infected?

With Microsoft's lousy security record ...

[mr_death]

... you'd think they might have learned to underpromise and overdeliver, for once. Unfortunately, the MS propaganda machine is going at it as usual.

Let's see, 50 million lines of code, a new IP stack, horrid complexity -- I'm taking bets on when the first service pack is needed, and when the first worm hits.

A side bet -- how many vulnerabilities did the black hats find in Vista, and then didn't report them to MS.

After the hype dies down, it might be time to short Microsoft again.

Antivirus is a cure worse than the disease

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Antivirus products. They consume huge amounts of computing power, slow my computer down, and cause no end of frustration when installing legitimate network applications. In other words, the cost and overhead they impose is far greater than anything I've ever had to endure from viruses that I don't get anyway, because I'm not a complete idiot. I only log in as adminstrator when necessary. I keep up with patches and security updates. I keep my data, the only unique and irreplacable thing on my computer, backed up. I don't click on every idiotic funny ha ha attachment going around. I don't install software utilities from The People's Glorious Republic of Aziberjanistan.

I suppose if you're dumb enough to think you need an Antivirus program, you probably do.

Re:Take the Apple Challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, wait, wait, wait. Your post doesn't make sense, provide the root/admin password and open up telnet and try to crack it? You do realize that no matter what OS your using that is c:\telnet host . ..login:administrator .... password:password.
 
This is the Mac Sec Challenge http://db.tidbits.com/article/01107 [tidbits.com]
Which contains
  % telnet challenge.comvista.com
  telnet> Connection refused.
in the article, telnet was not open, just WWW and the account username wasn't the root or admin, it was a user for the web page.
 
The fact that this is modded with a score of 5 goes to show how Mac biased Slashdot is.
 
But OTOH, I would put AV on Vista mostly due to the fact that I don't know what pages my family are browsing on. My own Windows PC ran for over 5 years on the net with no AV and just my own lockdowns and it worked out just fine. But silly users tend to click things I wouldn't, especially kids...so I would still have to disagree with the MS guys statement.

Amen!

[Agram]

Had the AV software makers had user interests in their minds, most of the virii could've been prevented through simple and succinct prompts which would warn idiot users as to what they were about to do. In other words, if the AV makers wanted to make honest living they would've incorporated an "educational" component to their bloatware. However, being for-profit endeavors, they simply turned in reactive repositories of past threats, as that warranted continuous cash-flow. SP2 in that respect was three times the AV software any of these ever were. I, for one, am very glad to see these blood-sucking fuckers go...

OTOH, there are those who do have a moral agenda, i.e. AVG anti-virus suite which has always been and continues to be free and is ironically the least bloated of them all...

Re:Also reported

[laffer1]

Its hard to say who the faulted party is entirely. Apple does change APIs and vendors use APIs they are told not to. Regardless, its a big problem. Most adobe products that are say 2 versions behind do not install properly on OS 10.4.x and require a patch to even install. When they are installed, there are issues with the programs ranging from permissions changes to severe breaking of the apps. When companies have to upgrade constantly or sit on old hardware as long as possible it benefits neither the company nor apple. This is a defect in OS X that needs to be addressed. Microsoft breaks apps, but you usually get a few windows releases in between and Microsoft is on a much longer upgrade cycle.

Point releases should NOT break api compatibility. If the code is that different change the major version number. I feel the linux kernel, gnome and several other open source projects break this rule all the time. Apple breaks this rule too... and no i don't just mean the linux 2.6 kernel is so different it should be called 3.0. I mean 2.6.8 is quite different than 2.6.18 and therefore should be 2.8 (odd are test versions right?) With apple, 10.4 has broken kernel module compatibility twice. This in turn broke the evil netware prosoft client i had to support in my last job and several other things like drivers for usb soundcards, etc. I've got a $300 emagic usb sound card that no longer works in OSX because apple broke the api and they bought the company so I can't ever get a driver update. Microsoft sucks, but they rarely go this far. XP SP2 was close on some fronts.