Frankly, I think this thread is hilarious!
Here I am lurking in a discussion between (presumably) grown, well-educated and informed adults, and they're acting like a bunch of nine-year-old kids out in the school yard:
"My Dad's bigger", "My Dad's smarter", "My Dad's more secure", yada, yada, yada...
Got news for you folks... All your "Dads" be suck!
Never has been, probably never will be, a "secure" operating system or application written. They all have vulnerabilities, get over it!
I do find a couple of points quite interesting, however. One participant makes the point that Microsoft is the target of worms, viruses, et al because they are a target of opportunity. Exactly! Anybody ever seen a virus written for Novell GroupWise? Anybody ever even seen GroupWise? The irony of the counter-argument to this is that if we were all to heed the advice of another respondent, why, then we'd all move off of our Microsoft platforms post-haste, moving to a supposedly more secure platform like 'Nix. Guess what? The instant we do that, all the "Little Danny Dirtballs" of the world are going to focus their efforts on 'Nix, the new target of opprtunity, and all of a sudden Microsoft is going to look attractive again. I refer to my statement above concerning O/S vulnerabilities. Every O/S Sucks!
Another point that has been made, but needs to be re-stated is that this entire episode could have been avoided had our Ivory Tower Administrators put down their copy of Information Week, logged off of Monster.com, and moved their butts into the server room where they should have been appying patches and looking after the health and well being of their end-users and systems. An eight month old patch would have fixed this problem before it started.
Which brings me to my last point. I absolutely agree that Microsoft has been negligent about developing code with security in mind. Perhaps you might even consider them ciminally negligent; I'm not qualified to address that. They've written an awful lot of vulnerable code, to be sure. Guilty as charged. Frankly, I'm not convinced that if they had been "Open Source" this would have been avoided. Now that Microsoft has made their source code available to various governments and institutions, I guess we'll see. But I don't think that anyone can begin to make the argument that because various flavors of 'Nix are ostensibly "Open Source" that it has been imune or impervious to vulnerabilities. I think that I can confidently predict that Microsoft product will become secure in the next few generational releases. There have only been a few times in Microsoft's corporate history where Bill Gates sent an e-mail to "Everyone". The most recent example of this was his "Trustworthy Computing" initiative. To date, Microsoft claims to have invested over $100,000,000.00 in re-training their developers and refocusing their visionaries and evangelists on producing secure products. This will happen, its just a matter of time, I assure you. In an earlier time, Gates issued a memo to "Everyone" when he woke up one morning and discovered that there was this thing out there called "The Internet", and decided that Microsoft ought to look into it. I ask you, how many of you are reading this in Netscape Navigator right now? Maybe more importantly, how many of your Grandfathers, Aunts, Uncles, or "Dads" are using anything but IE? My point is, when Bill Gates says it's going to happen, it happens, guaranteed.
Ok, end of rant. I think I've manage to piss off or alienate pretty much everyone out there. And me just some silly newbie. Thanks for listening.
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