On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:44:44AM +0000, Jamie Bowden wrote:
While MS may be a favorite whipping boy, let's not pretend that if the dominant OS were Apple or some flavor of *nix, things would be any better.
There is an inherent advantage for anything based upon *BSD. It was developed in an evironment where in order to continue to operate it was required to defend itself against many users who wished to exploit the O/S. Windows, being designed for a single-user environment, made a number of design decisions which directly conflict with security. Having spoken to MS security about this, there is no interest on their part in disturbing the "user experience" in exchange for drastic security improvements. Rather, they continue to gradually evolve their existing model to increase security which, in fact, has been improved, however slowly. It is important to understand that there is nothing inherent in the Windows experience which prohibits security. Rather, it is a deliberate design choice on the part of MS.