IF the programmers of Apple OSX, Linux, and BSD can make mostly malware-free software, Microsoft can also. Those operating systems have fewer vulnerabilities because they were designed to be secure.
Microsoft have made secure software in the past. I recall them touting one of the earlier stable NT releases passing some DoD standard or other for security.
What the morons from marketing did not tell you, was that the DoD had some qualifications attached to an NT system meeting their standard - the key one being: Not connected to the Internet.
I still wonder if the No Such Agency still has thousands of VMS systems. I've not used VMS (or, as it became, OpenVMS) in the last five years. I know many Unix fans really hated it, but the entire development of the OS was done using good, tested Software Engineering principles. It was fun when everyone was screaming about the world ending because of the Y2K problem. Alas, I can't find the great response one of the engineers - basically saying that Y2K was not an issue due to the internal date format, and Y10K would only be a problem for displaying the dates.
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
I regularly end up helping people who've bought a new PC which comes infested with the Norton malware. If you don't rip it out before the free trial ends it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. And, of course, if you wait until the trial expires, you've probably caught some nasty - their package is, to put it bluntly, a bloated and useless piece of shit.
It sounds like Microsoft's offering is considerably less obtrusive, and end users will not be hit with the problems I've seen with my preferred solution, Avira.
I've used, and recommended Avira for years, it is completely free for non-commercial use and all you have to put up with is a once-a-day popup advert for their paid products. This is a good thing for non-technical users, it gives them a reminder that their anti-virus has just updated and is still working.
What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it. This means that unless you're reasonably technically savvy you will get constant nagging that you have no antivirus product. I wonder if that had anything to do with their plans to release this new product.
T=5:43: Can you believe that Microsoft put the launch of Windows 7 in our hands? Couldn't have said it better myself. I love the token nerd, attractive woman, old-but-hip person, and black guy. It's like they hired marketing undergraduates to design the video.
You foolish and naive individual. You don't hire marketing undergraduates. They'll suck cock for the networking opportunities.
Now, does Herr Ballmer have lipstick somewhere incriminating, or a rash from a five-o-clock shadow?
Hey, they learned from the best. After all, when God created humans, he connected the recreation center right to the waste disposal area.
That is an example of obsessive reuse of code, and repurposing it for something for which it was never intended.
I'm old enough to have lived through Race Riots in my high school. People making stuff like this to use "against the man" - people have no business doing that. I have no problem criminalizing normal stuff and arresting people "interested" in making them - because it's just plain old simple terrorism.
Those of you supporting this have taken one little step from being just anti-Bush to pro Blow Stuff Up. Slippery slope.
Cops are supposed to have an unfair advantage. What do you think about armor piercing bullets?
You, despite the claim to an exalted position within Christianity, are a fucking idiot.
The police generally have my sympathies when required to work street protests. However, many of the arrogant bastards seem to think you do not have the right to protest. This is where you see use of agent-provocateurs within a protesting crowd to give the police the excuse to deploy whatever today's definition of "reasonable force" is. Yes, that just might end up being armour piercing bullets, because there will be a protester/police arms race, and when the protesters start using homemade body armour in response to rubber bullets it will go that way.
I personally don't have a huge amount of sympathy for a lot of the anti-globalisation or environmental causes - there has been little to no effort to think through the consequences were their demands met; we would have to give up most of the modern conveniences we are so used to. That, however, does not give those in authority the right to adopt some of the aggressive techniques for crowd control and dispersal we see discussed here recently.
It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
You have that rather backwards. In all too many cases, it is the media who control the politicians.
In short: Yes, there are anti-democratic forces at play, and yet we are still our own worst enemies.
Yes. And the worst offender is Rupert Murdoch.
Look at the lengths this man will go to in order to have control of the media, he took American citizenship so he could buy a TV station in the country. Now, you have Fox News.
To Mr Murdoch it is about power. His control over media - on a near-global scale - makes politicians his playthings. If you are suspicious of government, then perhaps you should not be ignoring the man behind the curtain. Nobody fucking elected him.
My two cents
1) Why should the bank be held responsible for something that is clearly the customer's responsibility? I.e. securing their fucking computer?
2) Maybe this will encourage folks to keep their computers locked down.
Mind you, I think that the bank should bend over backwards to help catch the bad guys. However, they cannot and should not be expected to police their client's computers...and likewise expecting them to pony up for something they can't prevent is also unfair.
The real enemy in this case, as usual, is the crook that did the hacking in the first place.
They can prevent it - or at least make it orders of magnitude more difficult for would-be thieves.
It's a really simple security principle, something you know , and something you have .
The what you know bit is what we're all used to, the username and password.
The what you have is some physical device that generates an additional security key - or a digital signature for your transaction. What I got from ING was a DigiPass. You need to know a five digit PIN to use the device, at login you push the "I" button, are prompted for the PIN, and it generates a login key. To finalise a transaction, the website gives you a challenge code, you push the "S" button, enter the PIN and the challenge code, the DigiPass signs it, and you enter the generated signature.
I suppose there may be some way to mount a man-in-the-middle attack on this, but you'd also have to get a valid SSL cert or compromise the user's PC so badly that the browser stopped giving cert errors.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
