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Search and Security a New FUD Vector for Microsoft

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Summary: Microsoft is searching for new fear-mongering ideas as it loses online (services and servers)

The decline of Bing has been rapid and I now see it accounting for no more than 5% of search engine referrals in my sites (I manage about a dozen). Bing is dying, so Microsoft resorts to pathetic FUD. It resorts to FUD such as this Scroogled [1, 2] nonsense we covered here before while it is also lying and cheating with secret belated patches to daemonise Google's server platform of choice. We still see Microsoft's partner Trustwave seeding Red Hat and Linux FUD, not noting that Microsoft even admits not disclosing patches. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichol has just written about this too:



Linux, Windows, and security FUD



It's 2013. but the Linux FUD just keeps coming. In the most recent example, security firm Trustwave claimed that Linux kernel vulnerabilities went unpatched more than twice as long as it took to fix unpatched flaws in Windows. This assertion would be a lot more believable if it wasn't coming from a Microsoft partner.

[...]

What no one seems to have bothered to do when they reported that Linux was far more lax about taking care of so-called zero-day flaws was to see where Trustwave was coming from. Had they bothered with even a simple Google search they would have found that the company had partnered with Microsoft to bring their application firewall to Internet Information Server (IIS). In particular, Trustwave made a point of boasting how they'd collaborated with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).

[...]

In the meantime, Linux, which I freely admit isn't completely secure—no operating system on the planet ever will be—continues to be be trusted by the world's biggest Web sites, such as Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia and by such mission-critical sites as the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. Now, as it has been for decades, Linux remains more secure than Windows, and no FUD can refute this.


Watch out for Microsoft spin because a lot of it exists right now and we haven't the capacity to track all of it anymore. Full-time job and family limit my ability to do this like I used to.

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