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Why Wait ?
by Andrew McCaskey
Slashdot Review Podcast
Sponsored in part by : WickedLasers.com the
world’s most powerful consumer laser.
A quick note for this coming weekend – The Techpodcast Roundtable should be convening for another session, at 1:30 Pacific this Saturday. We expect confirmation tomorrow, and more details later in the week. Further notes – we welcome back Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central, who returned to Hawaii on a flight today and, we expect, will be joining us in some capacity on Saturday.
You may have noted the article on the Windows Monoculture - an elaboration of an Article at eWeek. It noted that the recognition of Windows dominance as a factor in internet security has been, at least tacitly acknowledged by Microsoft itself.
” Microsoft announced in March 2006 that it would add code-scrambling diversity to make Windows Vista more resilient to virus and worm attacks, you could almost visualize a wry smile from Dan Geer.
Geer, a computer security guru with a doctorate in biostatistics from Harvard University, lost his job as chief technology officer of consulting company @Stake in 2003 after co-authoring a report that blamed Microsoft’s operating system monopoly and complex code base for the frailty of the Internet.
Exactly three years later this month, Geer insists that the risks associated with Microsoft’s virtual monoculture remain the same, but a quick glance at the future direction of the world’s largest software maker gives Geer a sense of “total vindication.” His ideas have gone from a fireable offense to a research priority for [the U.S. government] and a product plan at Microsoft,” Microsoft has added something called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to Windows Vista, a security feature that randomly arranges the positions of key data areas to prevent malicious hackers from predicting target addresses. This will block the majority of buffer overflow tricks used in about two-thirds of all worm attacks and, even more importantly, will effectively create software diversity within a single operating system.
A recent session on GoToMeeting with my Dad, in an attempt for another spyware/adware cleaning session gave me the distinct impression of shoveling sand against the tide. Trying to improve my own housekeeping, the the Ubuntu installs here – which are used almost totally for email and web browsing and some heavy processing of log files about once a month go about their work in unremarkable fashion.
Why wait for Vista ? You can add some of your own code diversity – it’s fun and not expensive at all.
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