Nothing is Foolproof

Even the Starship Enterprise’s computers were broken into by countless aliens. (Quite easily I might add, complete compromise of a starship? Must be running Windows 98).

So I won’t blow this comment out of proportion, I think that it was a bit taken out of context:

During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system’s new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.

Just because you’ve added some new security features (which aren’t out in the public quite yet – give those high schoolers some time – doesn’t mean that you can forgo other precautionary measures.

I’ll give you an example: It’s my favorite feature within Windows Vista, it’s called ASLR (Address Space [Layout] Randomization). What it does is, each Windows Vista machine is slightly different than every other Windows Vista machine. So even if there is a remote exploit on one machine, and a worm tries to jump from one machine to another, the probability of that actually succeeding is very small.

We’ll see what happens after this upcoming summer vacation.