TEN good reasons to upgrade to Windows VISTA right now

[invader]

I should think most virus writers target Windows because it has the largest

install base out there. Sure, it has security holes, but so do Linux and

Mac

My belief is that the virus writers target everything they can. If they can
infiltrate Linux servers then they will do so. Furthermore, Humans are
something that can always be exploited, regardless of the operating system
and Microsoft has made exploting humans trivial. The only thing UAC does to
prevent this is make the user click one more time.

Feature creep is a big part of where Microsoft dropped the ball on the whole
security issue. Take for example email attachments in Outlook Express. The
instances in which an end-user actually needs to download executable code and
run it are extremely rare. Furthermore, there's absolutely no good reason why
an email client should ever run executable code (like an ActiveX) as part of
viewing a message. From the beginning, Outlook Express made this task easy,
which led to a popular infection vector for viruses and other malware.

The same problem exists with the browser. Rather than use a technology that
could be easily sandboxed like Java, Microsoft makes the decision to roll
their own solution using ActiveX, which led to another infection vector.

These two situations (Web Browsing and Email) are where a protection system
needed to be deployed, and it needed to be done 5 years ago, not now.
Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft didn't develop IE or OE simply to keep the
anti-virus software companies in business.

Microsoft has always suffered from "featuritis", the uncontrollable urge of
throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the operating system. Several
instances of this were marketing/monopolisation ploys by the company: make
the web browser inseperable from the OS, make the OS so feature-rich that it
cannot be emulated on Linux, etc. It came around to bite them in the ass, and
what do they do, but release the most complex feature-rich operating system
in their history.

 

[Lang Murphy]

Well... I just installed SuSE 10.1 in a VM last night. My gawd... took
forever.

And talk about yer kitchen sink... holy crap; there's more stuff in SuSE
than there is in Vista. Or at least it seems that way; I didn't take a roll
call of all the stuff that got installed but there's video editing, image
editing, and so on and so forth... yeah, it's not "part" of the OS, but
neither are the video and image editing tools in Vista. Can you run them
elsewhere? Probably not, but they're not integral parts of the OS.

And out of the first three things I tried to open... two of them wanted me
to provide root pw. Not just click on an OK button, but type the pw and then
click on OK. One can disable UAC in Vista... can one disable the need to
supply root pw in SuSE? One would hope not, but, whatever... that's not the
point I'm trying to make here.

I think MS is making an effort to improve security in Windows. Are they
"there" yet? No. But turning off UAC because one doesn't want to
actually -read- a dialog box and then click on an OK button would lead me to
think that that person probably didn't give a hoot and a holler about
security. Personally, the way things are these days, I'll take every level
of security afforded me, whether it's fully cooked or not.

Lang

 

[invader]

Well... I just installed SuSE 10.1 in a VM last night. My gawd... took

forever.

I've never tried SuSE. My most recent work has been with RHEL4 and FC4. If
the SuSE installer is like the RedHat installer, then it should be relatively
easy for you to turn off any such things you don't want ahead of time.

click on OK. One can disable UAC in Vista... can one disable the need to
supply root pw in SuSE? One would hope not, but, whatever... that's not the
point I'm trying to make here.

You should be able to set your root password to an empty string somehow, plus
you can always log in as root. You have to keep in mind that Linux/Unix was
designed from the beginning as a multi-user operating system with a need to
protect users from one another (for example, in a University environment) and
as such has very different design goals than Windows, which was designed as a
single-user desktop OS. That's one of the reasons why I use Windows on my
desktop rather than using Linux. It's also the reason why I use Linux anytime
I need a server instead of Windows. They're two very different operating
systems with two very different purposes.

I think MS is making an effort to improve security in Windows. Are they
"there" yet? No. But turning off UAC because one doesn't want to
actually -read- a dialog box and then click on an OK button would lead me

My latest take on the problem is that Microsoft has overstressed the
importance of isolating users from one another. They've tried to make it too
much like Linux with strong seperation between users. I believe that Windows
will remain by-and-large a single-user operating system, and there is no need
for strong seperation between users.

I think what we need is a sort of 'UAC lite'. Some things clearly should
generate a UAC prompt. For example, if I visit a web site and something on
the website wants to install itself as a startup program, replace a DLL, or
startup a service, then I want to be able to stop it. However, other things
-- like setting the clock, running the "Vista Score" benchmark, opening the
resource monitor, etc -- clearly do not present a threat and should not
invoke a UAC popup. In a multi-user environment they would be a concern (I
would be mucking with the other users' clock as well as my own), but in a
single-user environment they are not.

I'm not sure how Microsoft would create such a 'UAC lite' (perhaps segmenting
the registry into high-security and low-security parts? or find a way to
detect when *I* am doing something versus when a program is attempting to do
something?), but that's what we're paying them the big bucks to figure out.

There are reasons why Windows is the dominant desktop OS, and one of those
reasons is that it's easier to use than Linux. [Yes, I'm a Linux supporter
and I've just said that] However, Microsoft has taken a step in the opposite
direction with Vista. If they make Windows as complex as Linux, then it will
be the greatest boon to Linux in history, as it will take away the #1
advantage that Windows has.