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More on the Roundtable Demonstration
This live event was one of our best and we hope that you will take the time and check out all the great coverage within the Round Table. If you have some time to watch via the web I recommend the flash version. If you have a Video iPod you will get the video via download.
Video Download for iPod (TPR-2007-03-03.m4v)
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Presentations included:
CEO of Pure Networks, Jeff Erwin, presenting Network Magic
Demonstration of Google Apps and Nettica.com by Todd Cochrane.
Demonstration of CrashPlan by Lloyd Hannesson
To get 10% off on Network Magic use the SDR2007 Code
The TPN Roundtable had some controversy – here addressed by Jeff Erwin, CEO of PureNetworks..
Kevin,
Upon further investigation by my research team, it appears that you are correct. While there is some very confusing behavior behind the sharing system in Vista, it does not appear as though we uncovered a security hole.
As punishment for rushing this forward without completely testing the theory, I am requiring that my CTO use Windows ME for the next six months.
In our testing, when we created a share in Vista under a local account on a different set of machines that were originally used, Vista did exactly what you would expect. If for example, I shared out c:\users\user1\documents\foo, then a share was created called “foo” and the shared directory was only that directory, i.e. c:\users\user1\documents\foo. It did not appear to matter whether this was an admin or non-admin account.
If however, I am logged on with a domain account and try to share the same directory, or any other directory under users, it shares out c:\users. Our testing environment further confused this since we had some directories that, at one point in their life had been shared out for access by “Everyone.” We browsed those directories and it appeared that Vista had shared out user directories for a user other than the user who shared the directory. The warning here is that Vista seems to ‘remember’ prior permissions. Rather than warning you, as Vista seems to want to do every step of the way, it is strangely quiet on this one.
Vista did not, however, share out directories that had not previously had access granted for “Everyone” and they were not visible from a remote computer. On further inspection, we noticed that not all directories were accessible, only those which had at one point been directed to grant access to “Everyone.” This was the root of our belief that Vista had exposed files that should not otherwise have been exposed.
I’d still make the argument that this is pretty confusing behavior.
If my research team struggled to make sense of it, what is the average consumer left to do? There are some rather interesting scenarios where, for example, dad might bring his laptop home from work. If he shares something on the home workgroup for a child and uses the ‘Everyone’ permission (so as not to have to set up a user account for his child on his work computer), that share might expose more to his co-workers than he wishes when he takes the laptop back to work. However, I agree that it’s not a large security hole, more of an ‘unintended consequence’ brought on by trying to work around the onerous Vista security model.
We are also seeing very different behavior in Vista folder sharing depending on whether you are in a domain or on a workgroup, differences that don’t really make much sense to us at this point. It is almost as if the different parts of sharing and un-sharing were designed by different teams that didn’t talk much. The overall experience to the less-technical consumer at home is daunting to the point of being unusable.
I have to apologize for misstating this in the podcast. It was definitely not intentional, we don’t really have to make stuff up to make Vista look bad, it seems to be doing a pretty good job on its own. We believe in the quality and value proposition of Network Magic and will never resort to fallacious arguments to market our product.
Jeff Erwin
President & CEO
Pure Networks
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On 3/6/07 8:19 AM, “Andy McCaskey”
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