Hackers, Meet Microsoft 496
Mz6 writes "The random chatter of several hundred Microsoft engineers filled the cavernous executive briefing center recently at the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle. Within minutes after their meeting was convened, however, the hall became hushed. Hackers had successfully
lured a Windows laptop onto a malicious wireless network. 'It was just silent,' said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit. 'You couldn't hear anybody breathe.' The demo was part of an extraordinary two days in which outsiders were invited into the heart of the Windows empire for the express purpose of exploiting flaws in Microsoft computing systems. The event, which Microsoft has not publicized, was dubbed 'Blue Hat' -- a reference to the widely known 'Black Hat' security conference, tweaked to reflect Microsoft's corporate color."
Blue? (Score:2, Interesting)
And 3.1 was a black background, but blue graphic.
Re:Blue? (Score:5, Funny)
And a fatal error... (Score:2, Funny)
So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Funny)
More likely:
"How can we spin this from bad to good?"
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Funny)
"That is a feature, not a bug"
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So, uh, during that hushed silence (Score:4, Funny)
Corporate Color (Score:5, Funny)
Must... not... make... obvious... BSOD comment.... aughhh!
Re:Corporate Color (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Corporate Color (Score:5, Informative)
How about 'Blue Screen' ? (Score:4, Funny)
Good start (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like Microsoft is showing their own coders how vulnerable their code is, but these are probably the people who already know that best.
Re:Good start (Score:5, Insightful)
But *can* MS actually do anything?
Given the bowl of spaghetti called nearly 2 decades of Windows, how much freedom of action do they really have to clean things up? Tug at a strand here to fix it, and who knows where the other end is? How many side effects will there be from that one fix? Yet at the same time, their market power is based on Windows and their code base. Force too big a migration, too much retraining, and it might well turn into a different kind of migration - to someone else's platform.
They've got a ticklish and tough job ahead. But then again, they did it to themselves.
Re:Good start (Score:3, Interesting)
All software has a life cycle. And Windows has reached the end of its life. Any decent software engineer will tell you after awhile if you are patching it this hard. All your doing is patching patches! And deffently doing that will cause more problems. Like a room f
Re:Good start (Score:5, Informative)
Apple didn't create a new OS from scratch, they bought an existing one - NeXT (although many will argue Apple bought Steve Jobs and NeXT was a nice bonus).
Moreover, since NeXT was actually released for the first time way back in 1989, OS X's codebase is actually around 4 years *older* than Windows NT's.
Apple didd this when small and surivived. And MS can do it now but cant pospone much longer.
Microsoft will not create another from-scratch OS in the forseeable future. There is simply no need. Technically and architecturally NT is just as good as any of its contemporaries. 99% of problems in Windows come from legacy support (being phased out with .NET, x86-86 also providing a convenient excuse) and less than ideal default settings (hopefully on the way out with LH).
Re:Good start (Score:5, Interesting)
the managed
Longhorn I hoped would of been a complete rewrite. it failed. There is not a single new innovative feature in longhorn now. spotlight searches fast and effective, on all but networked drives. GPU driven displays OSX and a large number of X server's(sgi's)
New remote command shell is a combination of applescript and a python interpreter. It would of been cool but it's been delayed.
Yet somewhere MSFT found the time to make their own Bit torrent P2P client and server setups. I guess it shows where MSFT lays it's priorities. An app that won't bring them cash or their Next Generation OS.
Re:Good start (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's not like they are understaffed on the OS team. Adding more programmers to a project does not ensure success and may actually make the process take longer.
Re:Good start (Score:3, Insightful)
Since XP was released.
OS X has matured into a great product getting faster and better with each release.
Linux has gone from hard to install for the average person to being easy.
Beos has come back from the dead.
Sky OS was competely written by a lone programmer(1999-2005)including drivers and a full GUI.
Now MSFT out numbers all those companies/people by 1
Re:Good start (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot responses about MS and BitTorrent are just FUD.
Third party support (Score:3, Insightful)
How long do you think it took Windows to reach the state its in now? If you looking at just the major changes there have been a LOT compared to other software. (Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, not counting updates, ME, or versions older than 95 and the unreleased Longhorn). Has there EVER been a major serious of software changes in history on t
Re:Good start (Score:4, Informative)
Using tools like void11, you can disconnect wireless clients. Windows automatically attempts to reconnect to the WAP. If you've got an identically-named WAP and you can overpower their WAP, they'll connect to yours instead. They won't be notified, and will think that they are on their own network. Which doesn't matter too much because you could alternately just sniff all their traffic (or even inject your own) without setting up a WAP of your own.
There's a lot that MS can do about it, and code written 2 decades ago has absolutely no bearing on it.
What's really sad (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really sad that they had several hundred engineers sitting around, getting taught lessons like this. 99% of the so-called hackers out there really aren't that great. And it's unlikely anything earthshattering here was used.
I find it truly surprising that not one single Microsoft Engineer could take it upon himself to discover these flaws beforehand. And that they were surprised by these results.
That tells me a lot about the Engineering talent. Hopefully som
Re:Good start (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a matter of levels. Sure, they doubtless know about all the holes in the code or whatever (being the ones that, y'know, PATCH it) - but it's a totally different understanding than that of an expert user.
It's like an Automotive Engineer and a Mechanic. They both "know" essentially the same things about any specific car. But it's their viewpoints and specific backgrounds that make their individual understandings both unique and useful.
Re:Good start (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like the old saying - three ways to do things: right way, wrong way, army way. Training recent graduates to the corporate culture only works if there are others coming in to stop it being an exercise in corporate narcissism, which is dangerous in a company like Microsoft that makes money by high volume, low development cost "good enough" software as distinct from the expensive low volume stuff you would trust to handle a stock exchange or air traffic control. If they aimed to be the best they would not be so successful, they would be undercut.
The guys writing the code need to be aware of what is going on in the rest of the world.
Re:Good start (Score:3, Insightful)
used to be you loved CS to go into it, now many do just for a quick buck or a job.
i'm in 3rd year at SFU, and most poeple i know can't program worth a damn. pointers, multi threaded stuff, assembler confuses many of them. Some never used anything but java untill this year! and then here i am sitting in CMPT 300 as the teacher tried to teach C++ to most of the class and THEN theach OS OS and threads. sad.
Skill level has come way down. there ar
Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:5, Funny)
I would think they would be looking at their shoes.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if you made a product, and were fairly proud of the work you had put into it, and then someone grabs it, and publicly demonstrates that it's terribly flawed, making you appear to be a fool. It's natural to be angry, and hopefully it will only inspire them to greater vigilance in an attempt to save face.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it takes public embarassment to get these engineers to take problems seriously, then they're totally fucked.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why, exactly? If saving face motivates people to solve the problem, then I'm all for it. Frankly, I don't care if they fix the problem because they want to save face, impress their girlfriend or because little green men from the planet Weebo have told them to. I care about results. If the problem is fixed, the problem is fixed. Their motivation doesn't even enter my mind.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that saving face can be accomplished by only hiding the problem, or squelching discussion of it, or pretending it isn't there.
Saving face generally seems to take the path of least resistance, and implies a desire to not face the issue.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm always open to somebody trashing my code. If they can trash it I need to learn what flaws I'm not aware of that I'm coding.
Re:Puzzled: why get angry? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's not. Say you work for Microsoft, and your job deals with the NTFS filesystem. You have done everything in your power to make your system secure, but you still have to depend on other coworkers making their systems secure as well. So someone on the wireless team screws up and has a flaw. The exploit demoed uses the pow
Re:Constructive criticism (Score:3, Insightful)
If same boss organized a conference and allowed SOMEONE ELSE to purposely expose my NULL pointer dereference by demonstrating that the mouse locks up or causes a seg fault or whatever, then I would feel that my boss was making a point: I'm an employee who is worth publicly humiliating.
I would find a new job.
SLow but steady, Microsoft rises from the ashes... (Score:3, Funny)
It's one thing to read about this on the internet - people say all sorts of things on the internet and you learn to tune it out ater a while.
But seeing it in front of your own very eyes, watching the hack attack commence in the blink of an eye, the pulse of a heartbeat, the shiver of a twitch, the essence of a raindrop, the flash of an instant, with the click of flint before it ignites the gunpowder in a Civil War era cannon-- etc-- it's shocking.
And so, ten years later, after learning from the hackers, their once-sworn enemies, the Great Microsoft rose to became Operating System: NWO. And that, my children, is the story of how Herr Syrs Bill Gates and Al Gore created and patented the internet.
Hey! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, IBM is Mr. Blue! Microsoft is Mr. Pink!
Pay outs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pay outs (Score:5, Informative)
From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/faqdividend.mspx [microsoft.com]:
I was sure it was green (Score:5, Funny)
- Peace
well, it's a start, but a late one (Score:5, Insightful)
First, at a company like Microsoft, I'd be asking about the 2 senior managers who didn't know about heap attacks. Second, this whole article is a bit of a puff piece it seems designed to put Microsoft in the best light, "Can't we just all get along?".
Good for Microsoft that they're willing to do this kind of thing... shame on them for waiting until the five years into the 21st Century. While I don't hold much hope Microsoft truly cares about security other than how it affects their public image and bottom line, maybe that kind of pressure will finally be enough to get them to clean up their mess, if only a little bit.
Re:well, it's a start, but a late one (Score:3, Insightful)
"I doubt that there is another large company on this planet that has that level of technical competency in management roles," Moore said.
Anyone can say that they have knowledge of a particular issue...how many of these vice-presidents actually went on to demonstrate
Re:well, it's a start, but a late one (Score:4, Funny)
Give them credit.
How many of 'em have sat in their lounge, constructing
a heap of crisp $100 bills from their annual bonus,
only to find it "overflowing" into the kitchen.
Re:well, it's a start, but a late one (Score:3, Insightful)
To Microsoft, security is about features. A builtin "firewall", VPN, encryption of this or that, trusted something or other. Applets and wizards.
They're basically stuck in that position, too. The cash cow is actually layer upon layer of such features, fundamentally designed for a different, and far less ambitious, job than it's now asked to perform.
I'd better stop, o
Re:well, it's a start, but a late one (Score:4, Funny)
"End of an era"? (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
Funny...the Fedora install on my laptop seems fairly customizable and fairly secure all at once...
Re:"End of an era"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux these days is generally more secure out of the box. But when you install it, you really need to do a 'netstat -ln' and see what's open. Then set up a reasonable firewall. Your average idiot out there can't do this. (I use Gentoo, so I have absolutely no clue how other distributions handle this stuff, and I don't know what kind of blackbox firewall setups are out there.)
Linux can be less secure than Windows. Usually that's accomplished by turning on all sorts of crap that you don't need, not securing it, and not updating it.
Windows, by default, is a typical blackbox. The thing is an absolute mess. Years after they first appeared, we still have Outlook viruses that pop up every day. Web browsing with MSIE is like playing Russian Roulette. At least with Linux you don't have to worry about that as much. With Linux, you set the system up, and it stays set up that way for the most part. So many packages (malicious and legitimate) change settings in Windows, that it's nearly impossible sometimes to have a good picture of what is going on with your system.
I took a Windows system down ony my home network because after one of my family used the thing for a few months I threw a traffic and systems analyzer on the thing and saw so much spyware and so many viruses on it that I couldn't justify letting the thing stay on my network. This was with Norton Antivirus running on it, mind you. As it is, any Windows installation I have is sectioned from the rest of the network for just that reason. They sit on their own subnet, can't talk to each other, can't talk to the LAN, and can only route out to the Internet.
Re:"End of an era"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Strange. Bad. Awful.
But it's the reality with RPM, or even Apt/Emerge. The Linux distributions really have limited how much stuff the average user installs randomly from the net. But it's a temporary thing...Spyware for Linux isn't worth developing, because there aren't enough non-geek eyeballs to sell.
It's overall a pretty cool article, but the comparison I had made when talking to Ina
Re:"End of an era"? (Score:4, Interesting)
While what you say is certainly true, I'm not sure I buy that as a complete explanation.
Consider Apache vs. IIS...IIS is in the minority there, but which is more secure?
Silence of the Lambs (Score:3, Funny)
2002 WTF? O.o (Score:2)
Sheesh! It's 2005 and there are still unpatched vulnerabilities. Damn hackers, they're always faster than us! (/sarcasm)
Re:2002 WTF? O.o or Why I Love SR-520 (Score:3, Funny)
Heck, they just released a bug fix for an IE bug that was already fixed, put back in by mistake (since it was still in IE), and refixed in Firefox
Wow, it's like watching paint dry.
Luckily for them hackers just go away on vacation in the intervening years between bug fixes
Wait for it, Wait for it... (Score:4, Funny)
Technical Competence (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? Maybe they read some document informing them of what a heap overflow is. It's more important that these managers understand what goes into the code and the technical details that make the system operate, not what an "obscure" problem like a heap overflow is. Microsoft's managers can only claim technical know how if they have experience working as developers, because otherwise it's simply too hard to understand the real issues that the engineers have to face.
Colors explication: (Score:3, Funny)
Black hats do black magic
Blue hats do blue screens of death
Some things to note (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Windows 95 came out, with its weak, obviously-an-afterthought "web browser" (IE 3.0). It was painfully obvious that Microsoft had missed the Internet boat, and shortly thereafter, Bill Gates sent his historic all-hands memo pointing the company in the direction of the Internet.
It took them some time to get it right, but eventually IE took over. Now, you'd have a hard time finding a Microsoft product more complex than Minesweeper or calc.exe that doesn't connect to the Net somehow. And let's not forget that Netscape provided Microsoft with some much-appreciated help in taking over the Web, by screwing up their own release schedule so badly that there never was a Netscape 5.0.
Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when Bill sent out yet another all-hands memo, pointing the company in the direction of security. At first, we all laughed. But now it's becoming more and more obvious that they're taking security every bit as seriously as they once took the Internet. They are aiming to be the top of the heap in security, and they've got drive, ambition and aggression.
Make no mistake, this kind of event is exactly what a company that wants to get secure should be doing. Thomlinson's comments about how seeing their code exploited "hits people in the gut", and the fact that "he was glad to see the crowd of engineers taking things personally" -- these things are right on the money. These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
In the meantime, Firefox exploits are cropping up at a seemingly greater pace. This worries me. It looks like a repeat of 1997, when Netscape lost huge amounts of ground to IE by producing a product that wasn't as good as the competition. SP2 wa s huge leap forward in security for Windows and for IE, and Blue Hat makes it obvious that Microsoft is just going to get better at it. In the meantime, Firefox appears to be standing still on the security front, or maybe even losing a little ground. Sure, it's still miles ahead of IE's security, but if IE keeps up the pace, it will overtake Firefox sooner or later -- probably sooner.
Is there any way the Firefox development team (and the OO.o team, and anyone else who's working on high-profile F/OSS projects) can take a lesson from Blue hat? Can we get together events like this of our own?
If we don't, I can already see that by 2009 or so, at the latest, I'll be telling clients to go with Microsoft products, because they're more secure than F/OSS. And I don't want to see that happen.
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think so. Of course they are now taking security a bit more serious, but there are so many big conceptual mistakes, so many design flaws, they won't and can't fix, or they would break thousands of applications which you can't just recompile...
Like:
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
- active X and other unsafe scripting languages all ove
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Informative)
How so? You can't create (for example) readme, README and ReAdMe all in the same directory on Windows, so you can't cause ambiguity like that.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
Normal users don't have write access to the Windows of Program Files directories. Now, you can argue that MS hasn't exactly made it easy for people to run as normal users,
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when Bill sent out yet another all-hands memo, pointing the company in the direction of security."
That is the problem, security can't be achieved the same way that browser market domination was. To fix security, MS will need the following:
A lot of rewritting, that is expensive. But can be done.
A lot of testing, that FOSS gets for free and MS pays a lot. But can be done.
Also, they'll need to modify the relationship they have with their customers. That is a hard on
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Working for a major Systems Integrator, our customer actually has a special team of people who do nothing but hack systems, and recommend security changes to the products they buy.
We thought we had locked down our systems pretty well. They turned it out pretty good, and produced a 92-page report. (of course, some of it was gratuitous).
However, the end result: slapping security changes onto an already-developed product, results in a whole lot of breakage. This lesson will benefit our NEXT customer. And it will really, really hurt our current customer. The lesson? Security should be designed-into a system from the start.
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, most of MS problems are caused by the fact they miss nearly every boat
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, for the longest time, IE was THE browser to use because of it's standards compliance, features, etc...
Also, the only security advantage Firefox has with not being integrated is that it's not shipped with the OS. The fact is, is that IE is shipped with every single Windows computer, and as such anyone ca
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
IE has no greater ability to do damage to the system than Firefox does.
Getting through to engineers is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
I reckon it's because so many programmers have at least a touch of Asperger's. The number of times I'd try to explain that customers behave like monkeys, focusing on the wrong things, buying products for the wrong reasons. But these reasons aren't "wrong" if it means the difference between selling a product and not selling a product. That yes, it's "wrong" to buy a product because we've used Times Roman screenfonts but the competitor used Tahoma, but just change the goddamn font, OK?
Reminds me of the story about 1-Click from Amazon. After patiently explaining what he wanted, the developers all nodded and said, yes, they can do 1-click. A few weeks later the prototype is ready and Bezos tries it out. He clicks on a book. And up pops a dialog box that says "Are you sure?"..
Read about this in Cooper's book "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum."
K.
Re:Getting through to engineers is hard (Score:4, Funny)
K.
Give Microsoft Its Due (Score:5, Interesting)
This represents a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Perhaps as a community we need to face the possibility that they may be changing. I read the entire article, and it seemed as if Microsoft genuinely wanted to change. I run Linux, and so do a lot of you, so it is understandable when a lot of you will deride Windows no matter what because it represents a competitor. I just don't buy into that philosophy, it doesn't hold much room for fair.
Giant Anti-Spyware, IE 7, and the anti-vrus acquisitions are all good indications. Let us just hope, for the internet and personal computing's sake, that Microsoft doesn't blow it and charge for them. Either that, or blows it so hard their customers (corporate and power user home) all look for more stable operating systems (hint: all other consumer desktops of any note run a Unix derivative of one sort or another).
Re:Give Microsoft Its Due (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft always catch up after being behind everyone else after roughly ten years, in everything they do. The same is true for their current drive towards security, where they are starting to catch up to, say, the seriousness with which 1980's UNIX vendors approached security.
The underlying problem though is that Microsoft only ever develop anything reactively, never proactively. Every move they've ever made has been kind of like: "hey look, company XYZ has produced this excellent product ABC, and everyone loves it, let's also start working on something like that and release a semi-decent version five years from now". This will never change.
So it's all fine and well that Longhorn 2006/7 will be the first MS OS ever actually built with a serious company-wide intention of being secure, but the question is, do you want to always be at least "ten years behind" like that? Do you think it's good to keep putting your money into the company that only knows how to "catch up", in an industry that really runs much better when there is leadership and innovation?
A step in the right direction (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has become synonymous with bad software. Why else would a company as powerful as Microsoft become so desparate as pull off this latest stunt?
This story includes:
1. Uncooperative Black Hats that somehow manage to cooperate with Microsoft to assist in securing the OS, yet remain blacker th
It was just silent... (Score:4, Funny)
And then some guy in the back stands up and starts yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers..."
Behold, the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The second day drew about 400 rank-and-file Windows engineers, including people who don't necessarily focus on security features in their day-to-day work.
"Don't necessarily focus on security features"? If this is just the reporter making up his own description it's not so bad. But if he's just echoing what he was told by Microsoft or whoever his source was, then they're looking at this backward and probably have been for a long time.
Anyone who touches that code for any reason at all has to keep security in mind every time he does it. It doesn't matter if he's responsible for authentication or whatever else they're including under the rubric of "security features". Any bit of code is a potential vulnerability. It only takes one buffer overflow, one set of bounds that's not checked, one line of code that doesn't validate the terminator on an input text string, to create one. And then it's a security problem for everybody. If making non "security feature" programmers aware of these issues is a new thing at MS, they've been doing this all wrong for years. (As many have suspected, but seeing it possibly confirmed is still a bit of a shock.)
Re:Behold, the problem (Score:4, Funny)
Chill. I was there. You'd have liked it.
a little niggle (Score:4, Informative)
An extremely dangerous stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a shareholder or a user of their products (except to the extent that the vast majority of the companies I do business with use Microsoft) but I find this an extremely irresponsible act on the company's part. If they want to try this sort of security testing, and they should, it should be done off-site or in a shielded room.
Re:An extremely dangerous stunt (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone doing even halfway decent wireless networking in the corporate environment is simply using the wlan as a transport layer for a VPN. Without the VPN you can't get anywhere.
Pride comes before a fall (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source software is not bulletproof. It suffers from security defects as well. The big difference, however, is we're up front and honest about it. Microsoft can't afford to be that way, as they rely on customer confidence and their monopoly to stay in business.
Microsoft seems to be understanding that their real problem in improving security is people, not so much the technology. By letting the "bad guys" knock the bricks down in front of the programmers who build the stuff, it ouggta sink in pretty deep.
Fix the attitude among the developers and the technical stuff will probably follow. Too bad a lot of slashdotters aren't able to experience the same thing.
FINALLY!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The invited security experts are familiar with all kinds of expliots even at the latest patch release. However, the really smart ones are not working security for a living they are doing International Corporate Espionage where you don't publish what you find, you use it over and over and guard it as secret so you can get paid as you steal IP from one company and sell to another.
Personally, I don't believe that MS will be able to fix Windows unless they go through a complete rewrite, that means beyond Longhorn before they get it right. They can continue to bandaid it or they can start over and design the way OpenBSD designs. Include security regression testing into their milestone workflow. While they are re-doing things they can also fix all the other broken crap that needs fixin!
two BILLION a year... (Score:3, Insightful)
uh huh
think about what that sort of cash would do to help out open software in general terms, all the various neato projects done with a few dollars and a lot of skull sweat. Think about if only a fraction of that went to linux kernel development, say something small, like 100 million dollars, 1/20th of what MS spends on "security research"
I am just amazed at this,it is just a staggering sum for those products and their "security features".
Engineers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Engineers? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Engineers? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.computer.org/software/articles/Speed.h
Re:Engineers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Engineers? (Score:3, Informative)
What REALLY happned... (Score:3, Funny)
M$ Exec 1: "Oh sh*t!!! We've got a security problem. One of our computers has been lured to a baaaaad network"
M$ Exec 2: "Crap. Wait, I know. Get MarComm on the phone. We'll tell the world we were running a test. We're finding flaws so we can fix them. Yeah, that's the ticket."
M$ Exec 1: "Good thinking! Maybe we should tell them to also release a statement that the BSOD is actually Microsoft's commitment to employee health. A soothing blue screen comes up, gently reminding employees to get up, stretch their legs, refocus their eyes..."
Thanks, we've already met (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, I see you're already well-aquanited!
Re:for Microsoft it is easer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:for Microsoft it is easer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"visibly angry" (Score:5, Insightful)
Real engineers are human beings and it's quite acceptable for someone to get mad before they tackle a problem they helped create.
Re:"visibly angry" (Score:5, Insightful)
I once worked for a company that hired an outside consultant to ask how they could get their product into a "better place". It was nasty code that contained snippets of Fortran, C, C++, and three other scripting languages. Some of the newer portions were being developed in JAVA with a database as the "inter-system" communication protocol. It compiled on one specific version of UNIX and threw memory alignment errors.
The consultant did an excellent job, and he really should be commended for identifying key weaknesses in the product; however, when he presented his findings, most of the managers grew visibly upset, and a few raised their voices (but I wouldn't call it yelling). People defend their collections of bad ideas, and rationalize that it's much more costly to fix problems than to just live with them a little longer.
I enjoyed my time there, but I moved on because I couldn't stand to see good ideas replaced with bad.
Re:"visibly angry" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is so true. I've worked with many people in IT and communications over the past 17 years, in financial, military and educational institutions from desktop support to reverse engineering. People who get emotional when challenged or proven wrong are putting their ego before the problem. Their ego becomes the biggest problem and the real problem they're getting paid to fix tends to get fixed in a way that makes them look good, which might not actually be the technically better way.
The most exceptional people I have worked with, shrugged failure off and carried on with fixing things or making them better. The loudest people don't know shit and cover it up with fast talking. It seems the quiet, well educated people who are comfortable with themselves are the ones who make the biggest differences.
Unfortunately, in the past 17 years, only two people in my mind stand out to be the exceptional people, the rest are all competing in a bullshit competition with each other or are otherwise mediocre.
Re:"visibly angry" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree. I've fixed/solved some majorly complicated problems in the past 20 years. In many cases, I've gone through periods of frustration that got vented as 'anger.' Once vented, I settled down to the task at hand.
The most exceptional people I have worked with, shrugged failure off
It seems the quiet, well educated people who are comfortable with themselves are the ones who make the biggest differences.
Perhaps. But that itself does not prove (or even suggest) that some exceptional people are not also 'passionate.'
You probably should not make such sweeping generalizations. There are many personality types among people who are very effective at very complex tasks.
Re:Invite outsiders or hire insiders? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they were an inside team doing the "blue hat" work, they'd be about as popular as Internal Affairs officers are to their fellow cops. There would be a lot of pressure to "just overlook that" from their friends, or folks who they feel loyalty to within the company.
Re:Knows about MD5? (Score:4, Interesting)
No matter. This guy -- I had no idea who he was at the time -- heard something he needed to precisely understand, and got his answer at his first opportunity.
It's kind of cool that senior management at Microsoft a) showed up at an internal hacker con and b) knew enough to not only understand what I was talking about, but was interested enough to demand more.
Dude. Have you met anyone in senior management? There's a reason so many people relate to the Dilbert PHB.
Re:Knows about MD5? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lured? (Score:4, Informative)