Bill’s Security Blog

You just gotta love stuff like this:

Microsoft touts Vista’s low flaw count
Published: 2008-01-24

Microsoft gave itself a collective pat on the back on Wednesday, releasing a report that showed that Windows Vista had far fewer flaws patched in the first year than the company’s previous operating system, Windows XP.

The survey of vulnerabilities, dubbed the Windows Vista: One Year Vulnerability Report, found that Microsoft’s latest operating system required 9 patches for 36 vulnerabilities in its first 12 month of business-user (corrected) availability. Microsoft’s prior operating system, Windows XP, required 30 patches to fix 65 vulnerabilities in its first year.

The report also compared Vista’s rate of patching and total vulnerability count to those of Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X, finding that the other operating systems had 360, 224, and 116 vulnerabilities patched in their respective software components in their first year of release. A reduced number of installed components were used for both Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux, according to the report.

The report’s author, Microsoft Security Strategy Director Jeffrey R. Jones, stressed that the analysis is not an argument that Vista is more secure.
(http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/668)

Ok… If you are not claiming that Vista is more secure than the Linux distro’s mentioned, then what are you saying?  Why mention it.

Perhaps just telling themselves, “Good work, team?”

I wonder how many flaws they would have patched if they had people actually using the system.

Bug discovery rates parallel the distribution base.  XP was adopted quickly.  Has anyone used Vista?

I gave up on Vista when working on a friend’s laptop.  I was logged in as “Administrator” and had to click a confirmation 3 TIMES just to delete 1 FILE!  Man that got old quick.

NEI had planned on going to Vista this year, but it looks like that is going to be delated due to general antipathy among the employees.

Here’s another quote from the article:

Other groups in Microsoft pointed to the study as proof that the hundreds of millions of dollars that Microsoft has put into software security has paid off.

Does that include their advertising budget?  Or the studies they pay for that always seem to show that Windows is more secure, faster, better, whatever, than any alternative?

Others are seeing through the Microsoft FUD as well…

I was in a coffee shop yesterday.  A quick scan revealed: 5 MacBooks; 3 Windows laptops.

This tells me two things:
1) I’m damn glad I sold my Microsoft stock and bought Apple
2) Apple will win the hearts and minds of the users… Business will change when Apple is what people know, not Windows…

My girlfriend’s laptop crashed last week.  I bought her a MacBook.  She loves it…

Bill

Multiple tar files in a directory and want to extract them all?

This works in the Bash shell:

for a in `ls -1 *.tar.gz`; do tar -zxvf $a; done