08.07.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Vista 7 is Under Attack and No Patches Are Available; Ubuntu Community Manager Uses It
Summary: Yet again a serious zero-day vulnerability is found in Vista 7 (which Microsoft markets as “secure”); Jono Bacon chastised by Ryan Farmer for asking Microsoft for a copy of Vista 7
THE reality behind Vista 7 continues to unfold. Previously we wrote many posts about security problems in this operating system, including:
- Vista 7 Cracked Again
- Trend Micro: Vista 7 Less Secure Than Vista
- Vista 7 Less Secure Than Predecessors? Remote BSoD Now Possible!
- Cybercrime Rises and Vista 7 is Already Open to Hijackers
- Vista 7: Broken Apart Before Arrival
- Department of Homeland Security ‘Poisoned’ by Microsoft; Vista 7 is Open to Hijackers Again
- Vista 7 Security “Cannot be Fixed. It’s a Design Problem.”
- Why Vista 7 Could be the Least Secure Operating System Ever
- Journalists Suggest Banning Windows, Maybe Suing Microsoft Over DDoS Attacks
- Vista 7 Vulnerable to Latest “Critical” Flaws
- Vista 7 Seemingly Affected by Several More “Critical” Flaws This Month
- Reason #1 to Avoid Vista 7: Insecurity
- Vista 7 Left Hijackable Again (Almost a Monthly Recurrence)
- Out-of-Cycle Patches for Vista 7 (Not Stable), Security Issues Noted by Google
- Microsoft Lied About Vista for Several Years and It is Now Lying About Vista 7
Based on this news, Vista 7 is not secure, even days after an emergency patch [1, 2]:
Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is vulnerable to a new zero-day vulnerability that exposes users to blue-screen crashes or code execution attacks.
Why would anyone use Vista 7? It’s a security threat.
Our reader Ryan Farmer writes to complain that “Ubuntu’s community manager [is] gratuitously advertising for Microsoft” by using Vista 7 for recording sound; “their community manager is writing love letters to Microsoft,” he argues and “their Netbook Remix is adding Mono apps like Banshee… they’re including their own Mono CIL files in the default installation… they’re selling “patent protection”… and they’re congratulating themselves for doing work that really only makes sense in their own distribution.”
“I’d like him to tell me why he needs Windows 7 to do that…”
–Ryan FarmerThose latter complaints he wrote about in this new post where he rants: “Nokia has contributed 1.42% of upstream GNOME. / Nokia doesn’t have a Linux distro, much less one with a GNOME desktop and they managed to out-contribute Canonical/Ubuntu.”
These statistics about contributions to GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4] may actually be misleading, so personally I choose to defend Canonical on that one (several readers disagree with me and they too need to have their opinion heard). Anyway, regarding Jono Bacon’s use of Vista 7 (we mentioned this yesterday), Ryan says: “You can output from a mixer deck to your sound card’s 3.5mm input jack, route it through Pulseaudio, and onto Flash apps… it may not be the cleanest way to hook it all up, but it’s not difficult… I’d like him to tell me why he needs Windows 7 to do that… the main problem in this situation is Flash itself… in fact, it’s the same “analog hole” that Microsoft is trying to close… notice how all of a sudden you need to have an “all digital” end to end connection to do things like play Blu Ray movies? … HDCP DRM and ilk” (more of that in the next batch of IRC logs). █
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