Windows Chief Suggests Vista Won't Need Antivirus 361
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.... (Score:5, Interesting)
(still have no use for XP, btw.)
@LiquidCoooled, about zombies (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, and where have we heard this before (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
With Microsoft's lousy security record ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose if you're dumb enough to think you need an Antivirus program, you probably do.
Re:Take the Apple Challenge (Score:2, Interesting)
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! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.