Fri 16 May 2008
Mon 12 May 2008
When I started reading my RSS feeds this morning, one of the first headings that caught my attention was this one: “Microsoft lies about Vista being the most secure Windows ever”. Since it is from a Vista blog that usually has good stuff, I clicked into it. After reading about the meaningless data that is supposed to support the claim of the heading, I just thought, okay, good job, you lured me to click on this. Very funny, really! Then I moved ahead and was quite surprised how many news sites took the same bait. So my second thought was that I am missing something here.
So what is behind all this? The source of this new Vista bashing campaign is Simon Clausen, CEO of PC Tools, a security vendor. This is how InformationWeek cites him:
Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed by Microsoft as the most secure version of Windows to date. However, recent research conducted with statistics from over 1.4 million computers within the ThreatFire community has shown that Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37% more secure than Windows XP.
Thu 8 May 2008
I have been asked to write an article about the Windows Vista vs. XP issue for the German magazine Computerwoche. They translated an InfoWorld article by Randall C. Kennedy which is one of the best Vista bashing articles I’ve read so far. After reading it, I was attracted by the challenge to defend the Vista pro stance. I agree with some of Kennedy’s views, but quite a few of his claims distort the real picture, in my view.
His article addresses eight fields: Security, Manageability, Reliability, Usability, Performance, Hardware compatibility, Microsoft software compatibility, Third-party software compatibility, Developer tools support, and Future-proofing. Today, I will only cover the security aspect. In future posts I will blog about the other fields. Not all of them deserve a single post though.
Thu 6 Mar 2008
Submitted by Jeff Botts
(The website is in German but has a translation link at the top.)
This is a great tool allowing users with standard rights to run programs with local admin privileges. It is based on SuDown and integrated in the Windows shell. Just right click on the icon of the program you want to run as admin and the context menu will give you the option to “Start as Administrator”. The current stable version doesn’t support global groups, so it won’t work on computers in a Windows domain. There is a beta that the developer put out on 02/24/2008 that is very stable and it works with global groups, too.
(5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)
Loading ...Wed 26 Dec 2007
Larry Dignan from ZDNet compared the vulnerabilities of Mac OS X with Windows XP and Windows Vista in 2007. The results are devastating for Apple. According to Dignan, Mac OS X had five times more vulnerabilities than Windows (XP+Vista). It is even more surprising that OS X had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities whereas Windows had only 23. So, does this mean that Windows is five times as secure as Mac OS X? I’d say no.
Mon 3 Sep 2007
Microsoft has a new blog: hackers at microsoft. No, these hackers are not trying to hack into Google to steal the latest search engine technologies. They are good hackers, the white hat hackers.
Wed 23 May 2007
An InformationWeek article discusses a new study that provides information on what IT managers think about Vista’s improved security. Only half of the 300 respondents are impressed by Vista’s new security features, it seems. Even more interesting is that only 14% “are eager to use UAC”.
Tue 27 Mar 2007
Last week, when I reported about this new Symantec study comparing different operating systems with respect to the vulnerabilities detected in the second half of 2006, I wondered when will the first study come out that includes Vista. I just stumbled across 90 days Vista vulnerability report of Jeff Jones, Microsoft security strategy director. There is an interesting debate going on now in the blogosphere.
Tue 13 Mar 2007
Update: I am working on a new series about the Vista x86 vs. Vista x64 issue. The first one covers the speed issue. The other article in this series will follow soon. You might also be interested in my post about the 3GB barrier. The discussion there is interesting. But now go ahead and read this one first.
Sometime ago, I published an article about a performance comparison between 64-bit and 32-bit editions of Windows. This post got quite a few hits, recently. Meanwhile, it has rank 8 of all posts here on 4sysops (see right sidebar). Obviously, many seem to be undecided which Vista edition they would like to use. In this post, I summarized the pros and cons of Vista x64 and Vista x86.
Mon 8 Jan 2007
Sometime ago there was a debate on 4sysops about the use of outbound filtering for personal firewalls. Some argued that once malware got started on the desktop, it is already too late to stop it with a personal firewall. I recently tested the outbound filter of Vista’s firewall. In my view, it makes sense for standard users to use it, but not, probably, for administrators.
Subscribe via e-mail: Subscribe via RSS:
© 2006-2008, 4sysops | Powered by WordPress
