03.05.13
Microsoft is Moving the Security Goalposts
Armchair reseachers fall right into the trap
Summary: Microsoft’s “patch Tuesday” is being rebranded and studies that are based on it continue to make GNU/Linux look bad
The game of counting vulnerabilities is a dirty game which Microsoft knows how to cheat in.
“Microsoft renames “patch Tuesday”,” said a reader of this site, pointing to this article. “What those updates would contain remained a mystery to the experts,” says the article. Yes, because when you patch proprietary software nobody really knows what is going on.
This comes amid some security PR from Microsoft partners like Trustwave [1, 2] (it got to LWN) and Sourcefire, which seems to think that Linux has existed since 1988 in its so-called analysis which neglects to take account of Microsoft's hidden patches. Be wary and sceptical of so-called ‘security’ reports that compare platforms on particular criteria that they score based on public knowledge alone. Microsoft has already admitted hiding security-related patches.█
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Needs Sunlight said,
March 5, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Seems like a continuation of M$ ongoing strategy to tip businesses and institutions into an ongoing state of crisis. Only in this case, they hold the data hostage directly, too. Once they collapse into crisis-management mode, rather than being proactive, they only react, and cannot plan ahead, not even to escape. In such a state they are easy marks for additional, ongoing M$ sales and, just as importantly for M$, unable to investigate or evaluate competing software.
In these cases the data is held hostage not only by the proprietary data formats, but also by being on M$ hosted servers. That’s an additional harm that “cloud” does. When the bills stop being paid, or the contract runs out, or M$ just feels like it, the data goes away. With data hosted on your own hardware, the data tends to stay until it is actively removed. On your own hardware, bulk transfers and backups are feasible. That is not the case with “cloud” data.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
So-called ‘clouds’ create a dependency chain, where Amazon for example may have another company depend on its infrastructure; when all the marketing hype is removed it remains unclear why ‘clouds’ (remotely stored data) are popularised at all. But that’s another subject that many news sites have already tackled.