Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the task of trying to stay one step ahead of virus writers and hackers will be a never-ending battle.
Ballmer calls security a never-ending battle
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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No matter who wins or loses you can’t lose if your the guy that sells the weapons.
For stating the obvious.
Stay ahead of the bad guys? He has to *get* ahead first…
Sounds like a planted news to change the focus from Bill’s words.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the task of trying to stay one step ahead of virus writers and hackers will be a never-ending battle.
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Of course it is when you offer a crap-ridden OS like Ballmer’s product.
Once upon a time not-so-long-ago the mere suggestion that you could get infected with an computer virus by reading email or viewing a graphics file would have gotten you laughed off the face of the earth .
Thanks to Ballmer and the rest his of his cohorts at Microsoft and in the UI world the laughter has now turned to weeping…..
Thanks a lot people.
I think we can file this in the “no shit” category. Are they just realizing this?
Er sorry buddy, Im no networking pro.
I don’t live in Virginia, or the US for that matter.
is becoming more fo a concern than viruses, worms etc.
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
for Windows users.
“We are going to have to be vigilant.”
Should have!!
“And despite the ongoing rounds of new security vulnerabilities and virus alerts, Ballmer said he believes the situation has improved greatly and can only get better”
How?!?!
“”It’s not like five or six years ago viruses didn’t exist. More damage has been done in other periods of time (than today). The last 12 months was a better 12 months by a margin. I do believe in the next two to three years we’ll get good enough and customers’ practice of implementation will get good enough,””
Please site examples. Practice of of implementation?
“Microsoft and Ballmer have previously stated the company will look at new markets and new areas of innovation for future growth and one that analysts and industry-watchers have tipped is the antivirus and firewall market, possibly with the acquisition of one of the big players such as McAfee.”
Great, half ass virus protection and firewalls. Never mind that the average consumer wont go out and purchase a real firewall. Now that leads to financial strain and possible bankruptcy of dedicated virus and firewall companies. Now MS gets to protect my PC. WOW, the last 25 years of MS protecting my PC has been less than stellar.
“One area Ballmer did highlight for future security innovation was the concept of “isolation,” ”
Here is innovation; how about putting the unused copy of your OS in a deep dark vault buried under tons of earth.
“”In corporates the No. 1 way people get viruses is, in fact, with machines that are on their networks sometime and off the network other times. How do you check before you re-introduce someone to the network? It’s a form of isolation.””
Once again, MS targets the corporate user and forces the home user to follow.
Yes, Microsoft is a big target (and perhaps deservedly so), and it’s true that they ignored security for a long, long time. But, now that they’re starting to get the message, let’s not fault them for repeating a message that originated in the online community: Security is an evolving process that matters.
Whether or not you want to admit it, XP SP2 was a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft and its customers. It’s going to shutdown the vast majority of external attacks from malicious worms — and that’s good for all of us because it will reduce random traffic spikes that occur when worms propagate amongst us.
Some of you don’t seem to realize this. Microsoft is a big ship. It takes time for it to adapt to circumstances but, based on its past, there are few companies that can match its ability to adapt. It wasn’t long ago that people were complaining about the instability of Windows (bluescreens, etc). But these things have actually become pretty rare (unless you’re a dumbass using crap hardware).
Whether or not you want to admit it, XP SP2 was a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft and its customers.
Come on… only because they’ve included an almost decent firewall? I’m still longing for the day I can use windows as an unprivileged user as easily I can do that on any unix system. Why they don’t fix that?
Buy an antivirus company. Sell a virus prone OS. Sell losts of AV software.
If MS said “One World, One Web, One Program” they simply say that there should be a monopoly, that a monopoly even would be good. This is the same what Hitler said with “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer”, Hitler wanted to have a monopoly in power for the aric race (whatever that is).
So in this particular aspect the two are not that different.
The difference nevertheless is huge, due to the difference of the methods used to reach that goal: Hitler killed millions of people with the goal to eradicate all non-aric people, MS only drove companies out of business with the goal of becoming the only software company in several markets.
At least they are beggining to think about security in the correct way. Even if teh security crater taht was SP2 shows that they have yet to be able to really put that into practice.
“Ballmer calls security a never-ending battle”
Ballmer can call security anything he wants because he has no idea what it is.
His brain is pretty secure. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out.
So he’s pretty much security defined.
Whether or not you want to admit it, XP SP2 was a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft and its customers…
It wasn’t long ago that people were complaining about the instability of Windows (bluescreens, etc). But these things have actually become pretty rare (unless you’re a dumbass using crap hardware).
You must be one of the lucky ones not having to spend a day rebuilding your system after installing SP2. From what I gather from my friends about 15% – 20% have needed to rebuild their systems.
Come on… only because they’ve included an almost decent firewall? I’m still longing for the day I can use windows as an unprivileged user as easily I can do that on any unix system. Why they don’t fix that?
I’ve been doing it for years. What problems are you having (that you think Microsoft can fix) ?
“I’m still longing for the day I can use windows as an unprivileged user as easily I can do that on any unix system. Why they don’t fix that?”
Well i agree with drsmithy,i have never had problems with
running all the apps on XP-prof as an unprivileged user.
Simply firing up filemon or regmon (www.sysinternals.com) and
filter on failure will do the trick if you give that specific
file or registry setting a somewhat “higher” right.
I have never used Home edition and don’t know if ntfs rights are included there ( that is if its possible to change them),
correct me if i’m wrong,i think they aren’t.
Take for example NERO burning rom.
Instead of installinh their admin rughts patch you could do
the following: runas /user:admin /savecred explorer
At first start nothing seems to have changed.The second time
you issue the above command the program (i wrote explore but could be any program really) runs with admin right.
Just making a shortcut to the NERO burning rom executable in this example with runas /user:admin /savecred nero.exe etc etc
You can reset this savecred under controlpanel–> Users and etc etc.
I wonder if Hitler was still alive, would he use Windows or Linux? Or, maybe, FreeBSD? Or IRIX???
That would be AmigaOS
Hitler would have had his own OS designed from the ground up, each copy of it would be a little bit different requiring fitting and finishing to fix any problems (they’d have to edit library binaries to make them work with things).
Is it just me, or does Microsoft seem to always get into things late:
The Internet, they practically ignored until the mid 90’s.
Security, they pretended it was a joke until this year.
Accelerated desktops, we still wait….until …
True multi-user home computing………until 2001 (2kPro wasn’t pimped as a home OS)
Working 64 bit OS, have they released it yet?
Runtimes and VM’s used for applications, Perl, Java, Python, and finally Microsoft includes their own .Net within the OS (they did have a Java VM before).
Remote Control, telnet, ssh, vnc, and finally RDP, but only for one version of one OS?!
Do these guys just sit around and wait for things to get popular before they dare show their knowledge of its existance? I’d like to see Microsoft get a little more expiramental, and add in features that their customers might, or might not, use.
drsmithy (IP: —.nsw.veridas.net) – Posted on 2004-10-04 08:59:44
I purchased SIMS2 run it on WINXP PRO (its a game) now why does this need to be installed with FULL ADMIN account and WHY DOES THIS NEED FULL ADMIN account just to play…
PLZ explain…
Kids are going to want to play this and parents might want to restrict what kids can do…
and the reboot goes on…
Been saying the same god darn point for 15 years…
and they have the cheek to call others PIRATES :-p
they were also late for
DOS…
GUI…..
Networking….TCP/IP…
GAMEs…
untill consumers allow them to get away with OEM bundling and not supporting any other filesystems or file formats or allowing them to break with standards then the sheep should not complain…
Do these guys just sit around and wait for things to get popular before they dare show their knowledge of its existance? I’d like to see Microsoft get a little more expiramental, and add in features that their customers might, or might not, use.
Big companies works that way, get used to it. That’s why they are mainstream in the first place.
Microsoft being experimental would be like Britney Spears doing a collab album with Mike Patton.
I don’t care much about that though. What I care about is that MS gets all the credit for those things, putting the small innovative companies or individuals in the shadow.
And for this he’s getting paid millions of dollars a year?
Why don’t they do what Mac did with OS X? A nice easy to use GUI on a BSD/Linux core. None of that Lindows crap please.
Dear Steve Ballmer,
You Sir, are a true MOTO.
(Master Of The Obvious.)
Ballmer is no Hitler. He is more like Göring: noisy, empty headed and full of principles.
He can say what he wants, but how is this news? Why is this posted at a site called OSnews? If I posted such a statement on my own website, would it still be newsworthy, or is only because Balmer said it?
The windows core isn’t really that bad, it’s the crap they put on top of it that is a lot worse. I think most people would agree that the NT kernel actually is good.
I purchased SIMS2 run it on WINXP PRO (its a game) now why does this need to be installed with FULL ADMIN account and WHY DOES THIS NEED FULL ADMIN account just to play…
No idea. Ask the software developers, it’s their fault. Not much Microsoft can do about developers who insist on programming poorly.
The _usual_ problems with games that require admin rights is that they (incorrectly) try to store their settings in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive and not the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, or that they (again, incorrectly) try and write files to their installation directories. A workaround is to create a group, put the relevant user into that group and grant that group write (but not delete) permissions to the relevant section of the registry and the game’s directory. Being in the Power Users group also often allows things to run that otherwise wouldn’t.
This is just pure laziness on behalf of the software developers. It’s not only the incompetent ones that do it either – DOOM 3 requires write access to its installation directory for savegames (shame on you, id).
You must be one of the lucky ones not having to spend a day rebuilding your system after installing SP2. From what I gather from my friends about 15% – 20% have needed to rebuild their systems.
Sorry, I simply don’t believe that figure. Why is it that people feel the need to exaggerate the negative in order to score points?
Windows XP pro has a sudo like feature , which you could
use to fire up regmon and by filtering on FAILURE after having
luanched the game or whatever app the register entries which
have failed to launch because of the lack of sufficient rights
will show up.
Steve Ballmer, on behalf of all the folks who knew this years ago…WELL DUH!
Had I not seen the the recent episode of The Screensavers on TechTV during which that Ballmer exhortation clip was played, I would not have fully appreciated the humor of this comment/mantra.
It was priceless.