Windows vs Linux security report card redux
Jeff Jones has expanded his project to count security flaws (publicly reported and fixed) in the major workstation operating systems and his latest numbers show Windows Vista has by far the best security profile when compared to the major Linux distributions.
eff Jones, security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, led a TechEd 2007 discussion on the metrics and techniques used to keep track of vulnerabilities and offered a glimpse at his upcoming report card that compares flaws found/fixed during Vista’s first six months on the market against Windows XP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS (full), Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (full), Novell SUSE Linux Enteprise Desktop 10 (full) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
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today's howtos
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The Master of All FUDMeisters
This series of 'studies' gets smashed to pieces time after time and time (see comments in the article for example), but it doesn't stop Microsoft from publishing false figures (READ: lies) and sticking them in pamphlets. Some industry supervision ought to step in and handle this case of misleading benchmarks. They got caught before (e.g. cheating in IBM benchmarks in the most ridiculous of ways. They more recently did this to Novell).
Oh look, another "study"...*yawn*
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*Switches OFF salesman voice*
Seriously though, we've been here before.
A Microsoft rep or a paid third-party presents a study which favours them.
They're done it with:
(1) "Get the Facts" website. (LOTS there!)
(2) Bill Hilf (Head of MS's Linux Lab) did it in an attempt to show Linux uses just as much as hardware resources as Windows...This failed miserably when you realise the system you need to run Vista (with all the eyecandy) smoothly.
(3) Attack GPL v3!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-microsoft-funds-questionable-study-attacking-gpl-3-draft-process.html
(4) And now this!
The fact is, such studies don't work on us. And how we beat them is to question and explain to others why one should be very skeptical. Any opensource geek knows charts and statistics can be manipulated to favour anyone. All one needs to do is select the right influencing factors to affect the result.
To be honest, you should ignore it. (like the other ones that fade into memory).
Come to think of it, we should file every study MS conducts or pays to be conducted in an archive.
Better yet, we should start a website that collects all MS's propaganda and document the tricks they do! It'll help MS's future competitors! (Gives them a clear view of what to expect!)