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Ordinarily I don't pay any more attention to Microsoft than I have to, but this was too funny to ignore: A Better View of Microsoft Security?; Microsoft to expand its Trustworthy Computing in a bid to help users and vendors understand security risks.
It's been at least a week since the last bout of Microsoft FUD hit the wires, so I guess it was time for a new wave. Today's FUD comes from an article Microsoft released on how its security compares with that of Linux. It should come as no surprise that Windows comes off as the Second Coming while Linux is left on the wrong side of Acheron.
Microsoft invents a ‘fix’ for some bogus security bug and ‘Independent Security Evaluator’ heaps praise on Microsoft and talks up the ‘vulnerability’ in Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
Microsoft security 'vulnerability scorecard' gives false impression of OS security, suggesting Windows is the most secure of all. Of course, start to look behind the pretty graphs and the ugly truth emerges that this is just more Microsoft FUD to try and derail the free software machine.
One of the areas where Linux really shines is security: you do not really need an antivirus if you are running Linux as an end user. In the Windows world however a good antivirus is almost a requirement as viruses and malwares are commonplace. I have personally seen Windows computers being infected less than an hour after being connected to the internet.
If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view.
Microsoft Corp. last week slammed the door on a free utility out of Australia that outflanked one of the company's touted security features in Windows Vista, by having the program's digital certificate revoked.