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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: _scar_face_ who wrote (63859)	12/21/2001 11:55:12 AM
From: alydar	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

scarface, would you rather run on tires that have been patched or tires in good shape without any defective flaws or road hazards. as for me, i want to run on safe, reliable, and secure tires for the protection of me and the people i care about. why would anybody treat the purchase of an os any different than tires? both items are a neccessity for most people. please elaborate. rocky.

To: _scar_face_ who wrote (63859)	12/21/2001 6:00:03 PM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 74651

There are many security issues in an operatingsystem, a few examples mentioned here: - Protection against intrusion. - Preventing one concurrent user from stealing CPU time, memory, harddisk space etc from another user. - Preventing one user from getting access to another user's data on the same computer. - Protection against human errors. - Ease of configuration and default settings. One small security problem that has been present in Windows for a very long time, is the fact that the working directory is included in the search path when launching programs. This means that a Windows XP administrator might accidentally start a hacker's program instead of the intended program, without ever finding out. This is an easy way to achieve administrator's rights on your desktop computer at work if you don't already have it. Another security problem is that many Windows programs require write access to their program directory. This makes it possible for virus'es and hacker tools to spread. A third security problem is that it is very hard to oversee the file security settings. On a standard Windows XP NTFS filesystem, it is almost impossible to get an overview about the current status of a file share if it contains a lot of files. A fourth security problem is that much software on Windows shares writable settings between users. This would be an easy way to hack another user. And then there are all those services running as the "system" user. These often include complex services with code that has been rewritten for each Windows release. Much administrative software for Windows is written in a way that makes it very, very difficult to configure a Windows 2000/XP computer to make the software run, unless the user is given administrator rights to the PC. In fact, many smaller companies automatically assign local administrator rights to the user that uses the computer on a daily basis, which is a major security breach. I can go on and on and on. The list of security issues in Windows is so long that it makes it very, very easy to hack. The only defence that Microsoft has right now is to try to prevent hackers from gaining access to the PC from the start. But as soon as the hacker has gained access to any service running on Windows, the operating system is wide open for further hacking. There is a reason why you should never connect a Windows server directly to the internet - you should always put a firewall between. This is not the case for most competing operating systems. Firewalls and virusscanners are patches to insecure systems. If your claim about Windows XP being the most secure OS around would be true, nobody would install a virus scanner on Windows XP.