06.24.15
Microsoft is Again Demonstrating That It is Not Interested in Making Windows Secure
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
“I don’t want a back door. I want a front door.” — Director of the NSA (2015)
Summary: Microsoft decides to leave Windows with flaws in it, claiming that fixing the flaws would not be worth Microsoft’s resources
FOR A LONG period of time (3 months or more) Microsoft refused to fix a serious flaw in Windows. It only did something about it when it was too late because the public had found out. Microsoft blamed the messenger.
This is not the exception, it’s pretty much the norm. Some Windows flaws exist for as long as 15 years, but they have no "branding" like a name or a logo.
“People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP.”“Dustin Childs says the company couldn’t get Microsoft to patch an IE exploit,” says this new report, pointing to HP’s Web site. “Since Microsoft feels these issues do not impact a default configuration of IE,” Childs wrote, “it is in their judgment not worth their resources and the potential regression risk” (a lot more damning information can be found in the HP Security Research Blog).
Given Microsoft’s cooperation with the NSA on back door access, this hardly surprises us. Even more sad than this is a new report about the US Navy wasting millions in taxpayers’ money to run an operating system initially released in 2001. People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP. As IDG put it:
The U.S. Navy is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to keep up to 100,000 computers afloat because it has yet to transition away from Windows XP.
After the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) disaster (Windows involved), we oughtn’t be too shocked about some nuclear disaster happening because of dependence of ancient Windows. █
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