But in the closed source world, you have to trust your vendor completely. All you get to see are binaries, so you have no way of knowing how they were built. President Reagan was fond of saying to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Trust, but verify." With proprietary software, you simply have to trust.

Microsoft, for example, pushes out security updates on the second Tuesday of every month. Bressers said they can't do that. Microsoft has the advantage of hiding security flaws and working on them at their leisure, but with open source software, that's not possible because everyone can see that there's a problem and they expect it to be fixed right away.

And if a security hole isn't plugged quickly enough, you can fix it yourself, Bressers explained.

An example of the power of open source is the ping of death bug. Back in the late 1990s someone figured out that if you send a giant ICMP packet to a computer, just about any computer, it will crash. The bug affected every operating system, routers, printers, etc. When the problem was discovered, the open source Linux operating system had the bug squashed in about 2 hours, Bressers recalled. The closed source operating system vendors, however, took days, weeks and even months to make and distribute a patch for the ping of death.

Nearly a month after a Google engineer released details of a new Windows XP flaw, criminals have dramatically ramped up online attacks that leverage the bug.

Microsoft reported Wednesday that it has now logged more than 10,000 attacks. "At first, we only saw legitimate researchers testing innocuous proof-of-concepts. Then, early on June 15th, the first real public exploits emerged," Microsoft said in a blog posting.

Why do I get the impression that some folks at Microsoft just don’t get it?

Earlier versions of Messenger played fast and loose with your privacy. The new Live Messenger 2011, currently in beta, suffers from some of the same defects