Symantec sees an Achilles' heel in Vista

?Friedrichs noted that in the Linux networking stack, vulnerabilities and stability issues continue to surface well over five years after it was first released.?

They were comparing that to Vista?s networking stack.

"Microsoft has removed a large body of tried and tested code and replaced it with freshly written code, complete with new corner cases and defects," the researchers wrote in the report, scheduled for publication Tuesday. "This may provide for a more stable networking stack in the long term, but stability will suffer in the short term."

"We're not saying that Vista's network stack is going to be inherently insecure when it is released," Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec Security Response, said in an interview Monday. "Vista is one of the most important technologies that will be released over the next year, and people should understand the ramifications of a virgin network stack."

Friedrich was mentioning that even after the deployment of Linux?s networking protocol stack, they were still discovering issues five years later. And that Linux was still working on perfecting that stack. How do you expect MS, who has absolutely no clue about security or reliability to be able to design from scratch a network stack that even today, via Linux isn?t perfect? Compare to Linux, I won?t, but if Linux is touted as more secure then Windows, I fail to see how MS could design a network stack better, from scratch, than tried and true code even from Linux.

So before you tout off, please get the full story and not pick and choose what to report on. The whole story is there. Don?t take it out of context to suit your own needs. This forum is suppose to be objective, reporting on both the good and the bad. I?m sure I?ll be flamed for challenging those who might feel threaten by a little mouse like me. But I do like to look at both sides of the coin and make an informed decision.