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Wanna guess what platform uses???

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=votehere.com

You have three guesses and the last two don't count - yes, Microsoft.

There have been some recent high profile breakins into various open source sites, however, these have been LINUX and I'm not saying "use LINUX."

However if you look at the track record of a close cousin:

http://openbsd.org/

I personally do not view Microsoft as viable for mission critical server systems.

Microsoft is a great client, great for games, great to play music, great for your mom, great for your grandma but it has been my experience that convenience usually supercedes security when Microsoft is involved.

For example a friend who is very conscious about what is installed on his Windows XP system was very annoyed that children's software he had purchased for his sons REQUIRED administrative priveleges to be installed.

So my question to Microsoft is, what is the point of Access Control Lists in the Win32 system to protect files, registry keys and even Win32 kernel objects such as mutexes and semaphores if through example they always "leave the door open" when it comes to securing computer systems.

Yes, I've gone on a tangent but it underscores what I said before, convenience over security. This has been a hallmark with Microsoft for some time. While Microsoft has been singing a different tune of late, it remains to be seen whether it is little more than than lip service.

Microsoft would do everyone a service if software was blacklisted that required administrative priveleges where it simply does not make sense.

Microsoft should adopt some sort of well known and predefined "roles" in Windows where a higher level of access (games accessing the hardware for performance reasons) is allowed but the idea of having administrative priveleges is largely eschewed.

Software developers targeting the Windows platform are partially to blame but Microsoft has done a very poor job of leading by example.

-M

Posted by: betelgeuse68   Posted on: 12/30/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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