Security Vulnerabilities with PCs
Since March 2001, Microsoft has issued 78
security updates, of which 65% were "critical," meaning that that they involved
vulnerabilities that could be exploited remotely. Contrast that with Apple's Mac
OS X, which, in the same period, has issued 44 security updates, of which only
3% were classified as "critical."
There is obviously a problem here, a problem that
goes well beyond the fact that Microsoft's Windows dominates the market and is
the OS of choice by the overwhelming majority of desktop users. Apple uses a
BSD-Unix based OS, and while not many people use a BSD OS for their desktop
computer, they are not uncommon among servers and other security sensitive
operations. Windows, on the other hand, is known for being the most vulnerable
of OS's. Isn't it time that Microsoft ditches Windows and starts with something
else? Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, supposedly we'll be have more
security features, but a lot of the bad legacy code — code going way back
to the early days of DOS — will still survive buried deep in the 40 or 50
millions of lines of code that will makeup the monster bloat of an OS. I say
it's time for Microsoft to start again from scratch so that this time they can
get it right. They can use as a starting point the code in one of the BSD
Unixes. It's perfectly legal. The BSD license allows proprietary companies to
use their code in proprietary projects. The BSD core would remain open source,
while the API's and the GUI that Microsoft ports over could be proprietary, just
like with Mac OS X. Wouldn't this be a better solution than merely grafting some
unwieldy hack on top of that horror of security holes, Windows XP? If Microsoft
continues creating OS's from bad legacy code, PC users will continue to be
haunted by the mistakes of Microsoft's past.
Posted: Mon - June 14, 2004 at 09:36 PM