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.
Sean Michael Kerner is an excellent reporter, and gives the impression of keeping a straight face as he wrote this article. It may be that he did; I know I would not have been capable of writing it as a straight news story. Allow me to share a few choice quotes:
“Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative debuted in 2001 as an effort by Microsoft to restore trust in Microsoft’s security practices. One of the items that came out of the Trustworthy computing initiative is Microsoft’s monthly patch Tuesday update…
“Reavey explained that Microsoft will look at classifying vulnerabilities into three broad buckets…
“The Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) will complement the exploitability index by creating a new community of Microsoft partners that will be given the details of vulnerabilites before the official patches are released. Microsoft’s plan is to have these partners provide protection in their own respective products be they intrusion prevention vendors , anti-virus or otherwise…”
…there is no cost to a security vendor for joining the program, though a non-disclosure agreement will need to be signed.”
In other words, they’ve been working since 2001 to get people to take the phrase “Trusted Computing” literally, instead of as a feeble stab at irony, and are putting all this effort into classifying the potential severity of exploits instead of writing better software, and are still counting on the bad guys to not launch attacks on Mondays, and it’s still the responsibility of someone, anyone but Microsoft to provide protection from Redmond’s malware-happy products. Oh, and this information is a big secret except to certain approved partners, so everyone else better be real good swimmers ’cause the lifeboat’s full and the sharks are hungry.
You’d think a company as rich as Microsoft could afford some more convincing Newspeak. But then, even Microsoft can’t create something out of nothing.