All, Check out the following excerpt from wired.com - and see if you still want Windows - Windows Not Expected to be Secure Until 2011, Says MS These days, every Windows computer is a war zone of viruses, Trojans, spyware, and other malicious code trying to exploit security holes in Internet Explorer. One of the scariest of all, Download.Ject, discovered in late June, worked to log keystrokes (usernames, passwords, PINs). All this despite Bill Gates' 2002 declaration that security is his top priority. We asked Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's security program manager, if Redmond is fighting a war it can't win. *WIRED: It's been more than a month since the first news of Download.Ject, and you still haven't issued a real fix for Internet Explorer. How long is it going to take?* *TOULOUSE:* The first step was to block this specific attack. The malicious software was being delivered from a server in Russia. We worked with law enforcement to get that shut down. And our product teams released an update that blocked the downloads that Ject had hacked. It was not specifically a security update for Internet Explorer. We're still working on that. *Meanwhile, Firefox and Opera look awfully appealing.* Security is really an industry-wide problem. Just this morning I had to install an update to Firefox to block a flaw that would've allowed an attacker to run a program on my system. We're working around the clock to make Internet Explorer safer, and we're making changes with our Windows XP Service Pack 2 to make browsing a lot more secure. *What about removing capabilities from IE to beef up security?* We're always looking at design. There's always that trade-off between functionality and security, and we've taken some steps recently that bear that out. For instance, the address bar of Explorer was allowing a certain type of rendering. People had grown to use that functionality; they liked it. And then we started to see attackers co-opt it to try to get software onto the machine, and we reviewed that feature and made the decision to stop the product from being able to do this. *Seems like you're fighting a losing battle.* It's not a switch that can be flipped. Software written by humans will always contain errors. We're fundamentally changing the way things operate, to help to make software more resistant to attacks. We're two and a half years down a much longer road; it's more of a 10-year timeline. Cy Shuster wrote: >Note that the biggest change most people will see is that XP's "firewall" >will be turned on by default (finally!). This will block other people from >accessing your PC over a network. This is a good or a bad thing, depending >on your setup. For example, if you have two PCs, and share a printer or a >file folder between them, this will suddenly stop working. Read more about >firewalls in Windows Help (on the Start menu). > >--Cy Shuster-- >Bluefield, WV > > >_______________________________________________ >pianotech list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives > > > -- Duaine Hechler Piano, Player Piano, Organ, Pump Organ Tuning, Servicing & Rebuilding Associate Member of the Piano Technicians Guild Reed Organ Society Member St. Louis, MO 63034 (314) 838-5587 dahechler@charter.net
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