Some funny MS Propaganda

[Marc Lijour (Professeur d'Informatique)]

Le 1 Octobre 2003 07:55, JoeHill a écrit :
> This is just priceless:
>
> "Microsoft's Security Response Center in Redmond, Wash., is the
> computing equivalent of a hospital emergency ward. When a problem comes
> in the door the center's director, Kevin Kean, and his staff must
> swiftly make an assessment: Is the security weakness detected in a
> Microsoft software product only minor? Or is it possibly so serious
> that, if exploited by a vandal's malicious code (as happened last month
> with the Blaster worm) it might crash computers and networks around the
> world?
>
> If the threat appears grave, the problem goes immediately into the
> center's emergency operating room, where it is attended to by a team of
> Microsoft engineers, working nearly round-the-clock to analyze the
> flawed code, anticipate paths of attack, devise a software patch to fix
> the defect and alert millions of customers of the problem and the patch.
>
> "It's triage and emergency response \x{2014} so it's a lot like an E.R.
> ward in that sense," Mr. Kean observed last week.
>
> The race to protect the computing patient has begun again."
>
>
> Oh the Heroic and Brave Microsoft Software Engineers, working day and
> night to protect the innocent! ROTFLMAO!
>
> This is the best part:
>
> "Other operating systems like Linux, Unix and Macintosh, experts say,
> all have security vulnerabilities. "But they don't get the attention and
> the attacks because, unlike Microsoft, the other technologies are not
> deployed on 300 million computers," said Russ Cooper, a security expert
> at TruSecure, a computer security company. "This is not just Microsoft's
> problem."
>
> Oh, really? I think Unix is deployed on more machines than MS, is it
> not? Isn't it Unix that *runs the freaking internet*? LOL!
>
> Source (if you can call it that):
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/technology/29SOFT.html
>
> Please, if you have a minute, do as I did and write a little note
> explaining some of this to the NY Times...
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
>
> You gotta sign up/register, but it's free...and I'm sure some of you can
> do a much better job than I did at debunking this shite!

He makes an interesting point here:

"Yet years of steady progress in the quality of software engineering will be 
needed for big gains in security and reliability to become apparent. And it 
starts with education, noted Shawn Hernan, a security specialist at CERT. He 
makes a game of seeing how quickly he can find security vulnerabilities in 
the programming examples used in college textbooks. It rarely takes him more 
than few minutes."

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