Vista Security Discussions Get a Rocky Start 111
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.'"
Extra! Extra! (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot has just sunk to a new low of pointlessness in their "articles". Urgh.
Re:Extra! Extra! (Score:5, Insightful)
More eyes is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
First, not all users will get the APIs. In fact, only a tiny fraction of users, all of whom work at security and anti-virus companies, will get to see these opened APIs. Why then is it good news?
It's good because it brings into the fold those most able to spot security issues. Despite Microsoft's money and the experience of their top engineers, they all have tunnel-vision when it comes to Windows. And it's not hard to see why, after all, it's their baby. So even though they've got top security people working for them looking deeply into these issues, the very nature of those engineers' employment makes it difficult to see some of the problems that an outside observer would be able to spot easily.
By turning the baby over to the wolves, so to speak, Microsoft is getting Vista tested by the best testing teams around. The OSS motto is "more eyes makes all bugs shallow", I look forward to that same principle working well here.
Move along....nothing to see here. (Score:3, Insightful)
"...we sent out a messed up link..." (Score:5, Insightful)
This is beyond bashing, this is being anal.
Re:More eyes is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think those who work at security and AV companies are those most able to spot security issues?
I won't mention names, but some fairly well-known "security and AV companies" have made their business on buying up other companies products, redoing the interface every year so they can demand people pay for a new version, and dumbing the app down by removing functionality whenever something breaks, because they don't have people smart enough to fix things. Outsourced $10/hr drag-and-drop "programmers" will only get you so far, and expecting them to possess intuition, assembly language skills, or a love for discovering what a function can be pushed into doing is expecting far too much.
Also remember that security and AV companies don't want security -- if their products actually fixed security holes, they would put themselves out of business. They want their products to temporarily block attempts, nothing more.
Gurus, on the other hand, work to get the problems fixed, permanently, and the people who made the mistakes aware of what they did, and just why it was bad, so they don't repeat it.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Symantec was one of the vendors shut out (Score:4, Insightful)
What's your point? That's the nature of the "work around defects in the operating system" market. Eventually, even Microsoft fixes them, and you don't have a market anymore. I hate Microsoft, and I still can't blame them for this. It's not like they're the first vendor to include, say, a filesystem that doesn't require constant defragmentation, or a stateful firewall.
"Accidents" happen... all too frequently (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, "everyone has glitches from time to time," but when people at Microsoft can't get an important web meeting to work it suggests that there's something flawed about this "all-net-all-the-time" vision they've been touting for more than five years.
Computer technology reached a peak of usability in the early 1990s, when PC vendors still felt that they had to make things easy to use (and supply real support) in order to secure adoption. Once everyone was locked in--not so much to Microsoft, but to PC technology in general--usability was allowed to deteriorate.
The pretense that unreliable, hard-to-use unfinished technology is ready for release is so imbued into Microsoft's culture that Microsoft managers are evidently willing to use unreliable, hard-to-use, unfinished technology to conduct important Microsoft public business.
Stepto should _not_ blame "us" for the "glitch" and apologize. Instead, they should take a long hard look at what it was about the technology they were using that made it easy to "send out a messed-up link."
Re:Extra! Extra! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they haven't, though it's amusing to see Microsoft employees posting anonymously now to defend the homeland.
It's a big deal that Microsoft apparently doesn't vet its own URLs before sending them out to third-parties, especially for such an important set of interoperability discussions. The guy didn't even check the link before he sent it out? It's a competence thing (lack thereof). These things just seem to happen with Microsoft, don't they?
Re:What a relief! (Score:2, Insightful)
God changes human not to be susceptible to disease (Score:3, Insightful)
(the point: if you're a parasite company that's living off anothers companies flaws, bugs and holes, don't complain about the cure)
Re:Oh the irony (Score:2, Insightful)
It was a false flag operation [wikipedia.org]. It was reported that the only reason it wasn't carried out was that Kennedy rejected the plan. I'm not saying 9/11 was a false flag operation, but you have to be wearing blinders not to see the similarities between this actual, documented, nearly implemented plan and what the conspiracy theorists allege about 9/11. If the US government nearly did it once, isn't it possible that, under a more hawkish president, we might actually have done what the conspiracies allege?
Re:World without reporters (Score:2, Insightful)
You're taking me a bit literally and out of context, let me clarify. A world without the 'reporters' that I'm talking about would be good. We definitely need journalists, or people who legitimately report on world affairs in an unbiased neutral "here's what happened" form. We don't need tabloid media. Reading CNN's RSS vs CBC's is incredible (and the CBC is not the least biased medium out there either).
As for the congressman and pages, that thread follows my argument completely: A lot of the 'reports' you see about it are nothing but hearsay and spin (just what I expect from Fox News and / or CNN). A 'report' would be that the congressman in fact did this, the page is safe and sound, and that the republican party disapproves and are investigating while suspending the congressman's membership (hypothetical example). A 'report' is not speculation on what this will do to the Republican party's chances in terms of votes or what Dohickey McGregor thinks about the mother of the page putting him in harm's way or whatever other useless experts and theorists they dig up. That is a spin on the real story. Jon Stewart provides better impartial views and more honest analysis than the spinners do, and he is a self-professed gag-media outlet. "fake news."
The Iraq war falls into the same category: the media has us so confused with a constant barrage of "here's the real story," that nobody knows what to think. I don't even know if they know what they're saying in the first place! It's pretty much "if we say Bush is under fire and Iraq is difficult, we'll sell more ads."
This MS thing was not even news, that is my point about reporters and PR.