Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

IDG News
http://snipurl.com/1d6zy

It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
currently tops the security software industry by market share....
====
Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products"
http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

In comp.security.firewalls George Orwell wrote:
> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
> operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
> currently tops the security software industry by market share....

Nobody needs Symantec. Windows' users need a secure Windows. Maybe this
is the fear of Mr. Thompson.

Yours,
VB.
--
"Terror eignet sich mehr als irgendeine andere militärische Strategie dazu, die
Bevölkerung zu manipulieren."
(Dr. Daniele Ganser, 2005)

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

George Orwell wrote:
> IDG News
> http://snipurl.com/1d6zy
>
> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
> operating platform and a security platform,

That's ridiculous: what is he suggesting? That they made the OS
insecure so they could sell the security platform?


> Symantec Corp. CEO John
> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
> currently tops the security software industry by market share....
> ====
> Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products"
> http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.
>

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

"George Orwell" wrote in
message news:b4c46c37e4d4085a4bcdfe6ab604b60a@mixmaster.it...
> IDG News
> http://snipurl.com/1d6zy
>
> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
> operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec,
> which
> currently tops the security software industry by market share....
> ====
> Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products"
> http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.
>


Yeah, and MS Paint had Adobe shivering in their boots, too. Yeah, uh
huh, sure.

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

On Mar 16, 1:32 pm, George Orwell Header@[127.1]> wrote:
> IDG Newshttp://snipurl.com/1d6zy
>
> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
> operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
> currently tops the security software industry by market share....
> ====
> Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products" http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.

ars technica - http://elfurl.com/mgaa9

....one senior Microsoft manager has admitted that OneCare shouldn't
have been released at all in its present state.

"Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's not
a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing," said Arno Edelmann,
Microsoft's European business security manager. "OneCare is a new
product-they shouldn't have rolled it out when they did, but they're
fixing the problems now."
----------
Oh, good!

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

yohlime5@yahoo.com wrote:


>
> "Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's not
> a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing," said Arno Edelmann,
> Microsoft's European business security manager. "OneCare is a new
> product-they shouldn't have rolled it out when they did, but they're
> fixing the problems now."
> ----------
> Oh, good!
>
>

Your point is what? It's part of a program's life cycle of
implementation and then maintenance. You pull the trigger and release it
and don't leave it on the shelf nit picking it. You deploy it and deal
with the maintenance and improvements of the product as part of the its
life cycle.

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

sososos
"George Orwell" wrote in
message news:b4c46c37e4d4085a4bcdfe6ab604b60a@mixmaster.it...
> IDG News
> http://snipurl.com/1d6zy
>
> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
> operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
> currently tops the security software industry by market share....
> ====
> Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products"
> http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.
>

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

Pegleg wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:16:33 GMT, Maximum Dog4
> wrote:
>
>
>>Your point is what? It's part of a program's life cycle of
>>implementation and then maintenance. You pull the trigger and release it
>>and don't leave it on the shelf nit picking it. You deploy it and deal
>>with the maintenance and improvements of the product as part of the its
>>life cycle.
>
>
> You must work for Microsoft!

No, I am a programmer that's been programming since 1980 and I know the
drill of a program's/application's life cycle, from analysis, design,
coding/development, testing, quality assurance,
deployment/implementation and then maintenance/improvements.

It's pretty much a standard that you obviously know nothing about. It's
a computer program/application written by fallible Human Beings and no
program/application is going to be 100% perfect out the gate.

We as Human Beings are NOT perfect and nothing we create or do is going
to be perfect either. That's a fact.

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

On 17 Mar 2007 10:13:41 -0700, yohlime5@yahoo.com wrote:

>On Mar 16, 1:32 pm, George Orwell >Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>> IDG Newshttp://snipurl.com/1d6zy
>>
>> It's a "huge conflict of interest" for one company to provide both an
>> operating platform and a security platform, Symantec Corp. CEO John
>> Thompson said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show in
>> Hanover, Germany. Although Thompson didn't mention Microsoft Corp. by
>> name, that company's introduction of consumer and enterprise security
>> products to complement its operating systems could hurt Symantec, which
>> currently tops the security software industry by market share....
>> ====
>> Not to worry, Mr. Thompson! Microsoft's "security products" http://snipurl.com/nocare are in name only.
>
>ars technica - http://elfurl.com/mgaa9
>
>...one senior Microsoft manager has admitted that OneCare shouldn't
>have been released at all in its present state.
>
>"Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's not
>a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing," said Arno Edelmann,
>Microsoft's European business security manager. "OneCare is a new
>product-they shouldn't have rolled it out when they did, but they're
>fixing the problems now."
>----------
>Oh, good!

From the RISKS newsletter:




Subject: When security software goes bad...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA rticleBasic&arti
cleId=9012499&source=NLT_SEC&nlid=38

A bug in Microsoft's new security product (Windows Live OneCare) wipes
out Outlook ".pst" and Outlook Express ".dbx" files when it finds
malicious email. So it replaces one security problem (the malware)
with another (denial of service). Leads to some interesting new forms
of attack - send emails to a victim that are just bad enough to trip
up OneCare and cause it to launch a DoS attack on its users. Affects
Outlook 97 & 2000, and Outlook Express on WinXP.

Shouldn't we have a higher standard for security software in the "do
no harm" category? Seems ironic, in particular, that it's a Microsoft
product damaging another Microsoft product!



Geo

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

- Bob - wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:31:22 GMT, Maximum Dog4
> wrote:
>
>
>>It's pretty much a standard that you obviously know nothing about. It's
>>a computer program/application written by fallible Human Beings and no
>>program/application is going to be 100% perfect out the gate.
>>
>>We as Human Beings are NOT perfect and nothing we create or do is going
>>to be perfect either. That's a fact.
>
>
>
> Well, I didn't check as of late but I recall Win2K being released with
> 10,000 known issues. The same tactics and strategy are still in place
> at MS.
>
> Not exactly the same as a cautious company debugging software to the
> best of its ability then finding bugs in the field which need repair.
>

So what? It's life in the big city. I got Linux on my network as well
and I see it getting patched to Hell and back too.

And if you think it's not the same with the other non MS solutions, then
you're kidding yourself, me and these NG(s).

Re: Symantec CEO rips Microsoft...but not by name

In article ,
- Bob - wrote:

>Well, I didn't check as of late but I recall Win2K being released with
>10,000 known issues. The same tactics and strategy are still in place
>at MS.

>Not exactly the same as a cautious company debugging software to the
>best of its ability then finding bugs in the field which need repair.

Have you ever been part of the software development team of a
non-trivial product that couldn't wait indefinitely for release?

If so, and if you were one of the major developers, then unless your
team spent a -lot- of time on strong designs, preconditions and
postconditions, logical proofs, and other elements of Zero Defect
Programming, chances are excellent that you've released your code with
known bugs -- possibly with *many* known bugs.

*Every* real development team that I've ever interacted with
has prioritized their known issues. Some teams had strong policies
about not releasing software containing problems of more than
a certain assessed severity; others just did what they could to
get the best practical product out by the fixed deadline. But they
all had their bug lists, and even in the best companies some of the
bugs wouldn't get fixed the same year; some bugs would end up
never actually fixed and would just be found to have "gone away"
when something else changed.


For example, I worked as the sole active software developer on
a scientific package (several years ago.) I kept comprehensive
bug lists -- everything I found wrong, I created a report for.
Some of the earliest bugs that I found were still there when
development was abandoned about 3 years later.

Does that mean that I was a bad software developer who should never
have released anything until the bug-list was completely clear?
(If so, perhaps I should have been less scrupulous as to what
I recorded!). But this was a scientific program: for some of
the bugs I recorded, there is (still) no known solution for.

For example, for the particular kind of values we were summing
together, there is no known way to find the global minimum of the
equation (which was important to the program). There is no known way of
finding general global minima even in 3-dimensional space, and this
program was working in 32 to 84 dimensions. Indeed, one can prove that
*in general* there *is* no way of finding global minima even just in 2
dimensions. So the task might not have been -possible-, but
perhaps if some world-class complex function analysts had worked
on it for a couple of hundred years, they might have been able to
find the global minima of those -particular- equations. So down it
went on the bug list: the program was incomplete and could
produce potentially incorrect results; there might
in practice be a -better- search method, and there might in theory
be a complete search method. Mind you, the hypothetical
complete search method, if it existed at all, might have required
about 10 the the 85th calculations... But it was there on the
to-fix list, with an action item of hiring a bevy of top
mathematicians to spend several decades focused narrowly on improving
one small portion of the program functionality.


Some day you should look at the mathematics of proving program
correctness (even restricting to cases where the "right" answer
to each subsection is known ahead of time.) And look at industry
standard bug rates. Even just one bug per thousand lines (very very low)
applied to a program the size of MS Windows (millions of lines of
code) implies thousands of bugs -- and even with the best industry
tools, teams that can achieve bug rates that low are extremely rare.
Companies can be very cautious and -still- have large numbers of
known bugs, if their code base is large enough.