Bonum Certa Men Certa

Vista 7 is Under Attack and No Patches Are Available; Ubuntu Community Manager Uses It

Jono Bacon



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:





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 Farmer
Those 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).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
 
Links 04/10/2025: "Privacy Harm Is Harm", Criticism Outlawed in US
Links for the day
Garmin Uses Linux for Some of the Garmin Products, Now It's Sued by Strava Using Software Patents
Software patents should never have been granted in the first place
Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day