What Did Microsoft KNOW and when did they know it!

[DentArthurDent]

Frellnicks! look like they knew about the buffer overflow LAST FRELLING JULY! I think they are probably the single largest whole in national security because they are not only pervasive in the private sector, but much of the government uses them as well...

from wired news:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62239,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

MUST.
calm.
down... and buy an eMAC when I buy a home computer...

AFD

[Beaulah]

down... and buy an eMAC when I buy a home computer...


I love mine!

BTW Looks like I might be moving to your lovely city. How do you like it?

[Darth Buddha]

Six freaking months... nothing like putting a problem like this on a low priority...

If it were making them money, I'd bet they'd have done it a lot quicker.

Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ.

[DentArthurDent]

Originally posted by Beaulah
I love mine!

BTW Looks like I might be moving to your lovely city. How do you like it?

I realized long ago that I can live anywhere, but mountains always call my name... I like this area a lot, it's a good mix of different stuff, and the sun shines alot! depending on who you believe between 275 and 300 days a year. That said, we still have definite seasons. So in winter we get a snow storm, but the next day it's sunny, spring and summer there are sunny mornings and thunderstroms in the afternoon, an fall is the BEST! Where are you moving from?

AFD

[Beaulah]

I'm moving from San Francisco.
How long have you lived in Denver? Do you like Boulder as well? If you could live anywhere in Colorado where would it be?
Sorry to ask so many questions. I'm kind of nervous about moving, I've lived here since I was 19.

[Tiriel]

Originally posted by Darth Buddha
If it were making them money, I'd bet they'd have done it a lot quicker.


Ya know, I'm thinking they should be held accountable for any damages any company suffers because their product was neglectfully inept.
Bannish the thought! We might even get working software out of them that way! Every time I have to agree to terms of a software and it says "...does not imply the usability and suitability for a specific purpose...cannot be held accountable for any resulting damage..." I keep thinking, maybe I should pay for it with Monopoly money and have them sign a waver that the currency I'm sending does not imply that it can be used for an specific purpose...
(and, yeah, I'm one of those weird people who actually read the license agreements before I hit agree...)

Just try to imagine that kind of disclaimer on your car: "The fact that we implented breaks in this particular model does not imply the usability or suitability of the implemented breaks for any specific purpose and you agree not to hold us accountable should these breaks turn out to serve no purpose whatsoever..."

Reminds me of a coder-joke I once read: If architects would build houses the way software engineers build programs, the first random woodpecker to come along would end civilization as we know it. :D

AFD: Linux is all I'm saying. :D
Love and Peace and I Sometimes Wonder If They're Using The Backdoors Themselves... :eh:

Tiriel :bounce:

[BillFrugge]

LOL

If you sued them, they'd get that money from you some other way. That's the way it works.

[gurnemanz]

Originally posted by Tiriel


AFD: Linux is all I'm saying. :D
Love and Peace and I Sometimes Wonder If They're Using The Backdoors Themselves... :eh:

Tiriel :bounce:

Mac OS X (which eMacs require) is a variant of BSD Linux. Yellow Dog Linux and several others can run on the Power PC architecture, too. The hardware is both open and capable.

And if the the MicroSlugs aren't being backdoored yet by someone, I'd be pleased to have the Justice System do it on our behalf!

Robber Barons!!

g.

[AgentSun]

my dream computer room would consist of a few pc's and a few macs. cause i like both, though i definitely prefer pc. but the mac is just so sleek and pretty that i cant help it.

[vhsiv]

"This is one of the most serious Microsoft vulnerabilities ever released," said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security of Aliso Viejo, California, which discovered the new Windows flaws. "The breadth of systems affected is probably the largest ever. This is something that will let you get into Internet servers, internal networks, pretty much any system."

Maiffret said some computer systems that control critically important power or water utilities were vulnerable. So, what software is in YOUR National Power grid, National Defense systems and computers all across the country?

Bonus Question for Politicians of all stripes:
Is a software monopoly a good thing if it's not just about browsers?

[waltersgirl]

Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ.

undoubtedly

[fandom]

Originally posted by gurnemanz
Mac OS X (which eMacs require) is a variant of BSD Linux.

The core is a variant of FreeBSD, not Linux, called Darwin, the graphic system is all new though.

[charmedmeat]

There used to be a page online (not there anymore) that listed the unfixed vulnerabilities in IE and Windows. There were about 30 of them when they took the list down, and most of them were of the same calibur of this one, (in fact I believe this one was listed) and had been unfixed for 3-8 months! This is nothing new.

The thing that makes these vulnerabilities so bad is that for 3-8 months there was published information on how when and why these issues occur, so anyone who wanted to create a worm/virus to take advantage of these could, and get away scott free.

[stellar]

Originally posted by Darth Buddha
Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ.

:rollin: :rollin: :rollin:

Does that make Steve Jobs the Second Coming? Boy, talk about a girlie-slap-fight of an Apocalypse.

[Darth Buddha]

Originally posted by stellar
:rollin: :rollin: :rollin:

Does that make Steve Jobs the Second Coming? Boy, talk about a girlie-slap-fight of an Apocalypse. Considering that Bill Gates is merely the most powerful of the new robber barons and industy tycoons, I think what we need here is a reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt.

TR would not be happy with what has become of his party, nor of this nation. TR rocked - and earned his place on Rushmore quite handily.

Now wouldn't THAT be a fight worth watching?

[charmedmeat]

Originally posted by Tiriel
Ya know, I'm thinking they should be held accountable for any damages any company suffers because their product was neglectfully inept.
Bannish the thought! We might even get working software out of them that way! Every time I have to agree to terms of a software and it says "...does not imply the usability and suitability for a specific purpose...cannot be held accountable for any resulting damage..." I keep thinking, maybe I should pay for it with Monopoly money and have them sign a waver that the currency I'm sending does not imply that it can be used for an specific purpose...
(and, yeah, I'm one of those weird people who actually read the license agreements before I hit agree...)

Just try to imagine that kind of disclaimer on your car: "The fact that we implented breaks in this particular model does not imply the usability or suitability of the implemented breaks for any specific purpose and you agree not to hold us accountable should these breaks turn out to serve no purpose whatsoever..."

Reminds me of a coder-joke I once read: If architects would build houses the way software engineers build programs, the first random woodpecker to come along would end civilization as we know it. :D

AFD: Linux is all I'm saying. :D
Love and Peace and I Sometimes Wonder If They're Using The Backdoors Themselves... :eh:

Tiriel :bounce:

Software companies (Microsoft mainly) forced legislation through in the early to mid ninties to make it so that the software you buy, you are not really buying it. You are merely buying a license or "the right to use" the software. This erronious law IMO is the reason why software has gone downhill overall, and I don't just mean microsoft (although they are a fine example of networking ineptitude). MMORPG's are a perfect example of this. They release the game with half the content they promised, and bugs that won't allow the game to run correctly for most people. Wide sweeping server outages, and information on characters lost for periods of time.

Why do they get away with this? Because the way the law is worded, because they are allowed to make IMO insane EULA's (End User License Agreement), and because the consumer never puts up a fight and merely takes it. After years of this crap and new people coming into the computer scene for the first time during this downfall, people merely expect this as standard practice, and that computers always mess up. Look at the days of mini-computing and mainframes. There were 20 years of procedures built upon the idea that computers should not and CANNOT go down, period! In the days of the marketing droids ruling the software and hardware companies of today, unless something drastically changes, you will continue to see a decline in quality of code as getting to launch is much more important than releasing quality code the first time. Remember, release now patch later is the motto of most companies out there in the field today. Unless users start getting wise and stop accepting the crap they do now, this will be the norm for some time to come.

[stellar]

Originally posted by Darth Buddha
Considering that Bill Gates is merely the most powerful of the new robber barons and industy tycoons, I think what we need here is a reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt.

TR would not be happy with what has become of his party, nor of this nation. TR rocked - and earned his place on Rushmore quite handily.

Now wouldn't THAT be a fight worth watching?

Not really. I don't really like to watch completely lop-sided fights. Teddy would whip that ass, probably call him a curr and then say "well, isn't that just bully!!!".

Maybe Andrew Jackson versus Teddy Roosevelt, or Ben Franklin versus Grover Cleveland... or along the original line how about Nixon versus William Randolph Hearst? I'd pay good money to see that one.

[LadyCrais]

Since I've been traveling, I can't for the life of me remember where I read this. In Discover probably, since that's what I read all day in airports today. But.....

I got a B.S. in computer programming back in the early to mid-80s, about the time of Commodore 64s, which I had. What we would call "real" PC's just hit the market the year I graduated, but most of my training was on mainframes, even punchcards for a summer. I was writing one of the very first programs to have "windows for user entry" in C, while Bill Gates et al were no doubt hatching Windows 3.1. Anyway, a program was almost an artform in precise, brief, pure, clean logic. What was considered really bad programming was called spaghetti code.

What the article discussed (and it was Discover, on the new computer museum), was that early on this kind of coding was mandatory because of the limitations on memory, RAM and so forth. And that now that it's readily available, it's gotten incredibly sloppy again, full of bugs and holes. What wasn't mentioned is the incredible complexity that's been introduced by the amounts of memory that are available. I quit having the slightest clue what was going on or how to take care of my machine when we went from Windows 3.1 to 95.

All of that's an aside I guess. My real point about it is that the industry has progressed to a point where there is not a single program out there of any complexity that actually hits the shelves bug-free, or even complete as near as I can tell. The very first thing you do with anything you buy is go get the most recent driver, patch, upgrade, or whatever, to fix all of the things that they didn't bother to fix before putting it on the market. And I don't think that happened 20 years, or probably any time before the advent of the internet, where the manufacturer and customer could actually interact.

And to be OnT, I was originally going to suggest that it was an extremely responsible decision to not publish the problem and alert the virus-mongers (what in the world do these people get out of terrorizing internet users world-wide) before there was an actual fix available. Because they're right, every one of these crazy SOB's is going to be writing code to attack through it within days now that it's announced. I rebuilt a computer from the ground up last week with Windows 2000 Pro, and had to get all of my updates on an extremely slow modem. I was "attacked" through a major hole every few minutes for hours on end until I got the 2nd service pack and a patch that required it installed. Mostly popups of messages identical to the spam that fills our mailboxes day in and day out. I couldn't walk away, because it stopped the download until I closed the popup. However these things are propagated these days, you're going to get hit incessantly if the hole is there on your computer to be breached. Heck, the virus that took down my work computer was first out in '99 I think it was. This crap just doesn't go away.

So I would think the fact that it was apparently published that the hole existed for this 3-8 months, I don't see how it could have had enough information for the hackers to breach it, or we'd have all long since had our computers taken out by it.

On the other hand, is it just coincidence that the computer I was working on all week got erratic after downloading this latest patch, or is there a problem with it?

[BlueCatShip]

It's all part of Bill of Borg's plan. One day when we logon to the net, we'll be assimilated. We'll eat papier mâché paste and call it a fine dining experience.

-- Just being unusually snarky. Even though my anti-virus swears I'm free, my computer is *still* getting e-mail from that frelling worm. -- I hope there is a special hezmana for people like that. It takes at least a little intelligence to program. Why the frell can't these drannits write some useful code for something, anything?

::hyper-rage imminent; chill out, man::

Sorry, gang. Just venting.