Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

[stringslayer]

While commenting on security improvements relating to Vista, Gates says:

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."

Source = Engadget

[Rance]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

I'm not going to argue on this as a matter of fact this topic is below me due to the fact it's as close to a political argument as your going to find with out actually talking politics simply because the people who like windows are going to stick their tongues at the mac people and the mac people are going to stick their tongues at the windows people and then it's going to turn into a big cat fight with no lime jello. Well I will add one thing just for the fun of it and it was the first thing to pop in my mind. What colour is the sky in Bill's world?

[stringslayer]

I'm not going to argue on this as a matter of fact this topic is below me due to the fact it's as close to a political argument as your going to find with out actually talking politics simply because the people who like windows are going to stick their tongues at the mac people and the mac people are going to stick their tongues at the windows people and then it's going to turn into a big cat fight with no lime jello. Well I will add one thing just for the fun of it and it was the first thing to pop in my mind. What colour is the sky in Bill's world?

Sorry, I certainly wasn't trying to start an OS war. I just thought Bill's comments to a major publication were interesting.

I'm not going to argue on this as a matter of fact this topic is below me due to the fact it's as close to a political argument as your going to find with out actually talking politics simply because the people who like windows are going to stick their tongues at the mac people and the mac people are going to stick their tongues at the windows people and then it's going to turn into a big cat fight with no lime jello. Well I will add one thing just for the fun of it and it was the first thing to pop in my mind. What colour is the sky in Bill's world?

I'm not a grammar nazi, but a little punctuation would be nice.

[Floydr47]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

I'm not going to argue on this as a matter of fact this topic is below me due to the fact it's as close to a political argument as your going to find with out actually talking politics simply because the people who like windows are going to stick their tongues at the mac people and the mac people are going to stick their tongues at the windows people and then it's going to turn into a big cat fight with no lime jello. Well I will add one thing just for the fun of it and it was the first thing to pop in my mind. What colour is the sky in Bill's world?

Close to a political argument? I doubt that. A security arguement would be closer to the mark. The question should be "Is there any truth to Bill Gates allegations"? If there is then it doesn't matter what the die hard Mac or Windows users believe. If there isn't then the statement should be viewed as a marketing strategy statement and nothing more. "Hacking" is a science, as with any other science the facts are what is important. Personally, I could care less if the OS is Windows or Mac as long as my information remains secure. Show the cold hard facts to back up the statement, that is all that I ask of Mr. Gates. Armed with the facts, intelligent people can arrive at their own informed decisions as to what OS best meets their needs.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

good lord... why do people insist on telling the press arbitrary figures that will not make them appear to be a prophet even if they prove accurate, and will almost certainly make them look like a fool when they are shown to be false?

just remember the last time someone looked right into a news camera and addressed a group of potential hostiles with the words "bring 'em on"... that really panned out well and certainly didn't become a source of riddicule and humiliation later, right?

i hope that Vista is a step forward for security, i really do. anything that cuts down on the number of compromised zombies and bots will help overall. i just don't want the new security standard to become "lock everything down so much that the users can't actually decide how to use their software... a long as they have no control and just interact with it on a passive, consumer level all will be right with the world... and we'll make killer revenues from overpriced, repeat-fee video and audio rentals."

[zoasterboy]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

i just don't want the new security standard to become "lock everything down so much that the users can't actually decide how to use their software...

I’ve heard how secure Vista will be, but not heard a lot about security other than the whole "locking down" of the system. I heard that the default user setting would not be admin. Those who are not admin cannot write to the program files folder. Programs run by people who are not admin will not be able to write to the program files folder. They get around this by giving each program its own virtual program files folder, but sounds kind of weird.

[bascule]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

Speaking from totally thirdhand information here:

Defender is supposed to represent the implementation of a DragonflyBSD-like message passing API, where the total number of userland syscalls have been reduced to a single message passing directive.

Sounds great in theory, but there was a system level exploit in Defender in Vista RTM

[VAX_to_PBX]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

I'll just make a reference to the Blue Pill root kit that's been out a while that circumvents vistas entire security layer.

Mac is just BSD with a fancy gui server, and additional device support(because they have binary blob friendly developers.) Although they did switch to IA32 which has low level architectural flaws in memory addressing amongst other things, but they probably did like the people at OpenBSD did, and implement safeguards in the H.A.L. section of the kernel.

You guys are the experts though...continue on with the broadened statements.

[astcell]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

Of course a Mac is very hackable nowadays. They can run Windows!

[DaKahuna]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

Of course a Mac is very hackable nowadays. They can run Windows!

Not that easy! Just because they can run Windows does not necessarily mean they do.

[VAX_to_PBX]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

If Mac had the demographic MS has launching massive pen testings on there listening services upon publishing them we'd get more frequent Mac/BSD findings, and the security newsletters would be flooded. Not to say Mac/BSD isn't more correct than win32, 64, and now Vista.

I've actually heard hard core GNU advocates say the same thing just in a different order. The contributer to vulnerability ratio for BSD speaks for itself.

You can setup the latest build of Apache HTTP on a default install of OpenBSD 4.0, and it's still a potential back door to outsider who understands the Apache source library, and it's deep logic flaws.

Don't get me wrong I liked Pirates of silicon valley too, but I'm not gonna be cynical because all the cool people are doing white dragons to the idea of using open source software.

[Asbestos]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

On OpenBSD Apache is chrooted in /var/www by default. It's still vulnerable to web apps and such, but you'd have to break the chroot in order to access any other part of the system with the perms of the httpd user.

But I understand what you're saying. ;-)

[VAX_to_PBX]

Re: Is Bill Gates issuing a challenge to hackers?

I was aware of that when I last posted. Chroot is about 10 layers above where common apache CGI bugs are, so it's really like a boat on the surface of the water while the attacker is the shark beneath in the murky water(analogy smalogy.)

CHroot is a unicode fuzzers problem. Most worth while attacks on Apache are through CGI input where you can influence behavior in memory allocation. Even with OpenBSD's kernel hooking stuff, and a third party stack watcher the house of logic analogy still applies.

All the populer GNU distros that accept blackboxing like binary blobs are getting closer, and closer to being like the win32 architecture. I thought I'd just use OpenBSD seeing as it isn't just a file system and utils with some interaction enhancements. It's audited all the way down to the BUS signals.

I can respect the fact they choose correctness over features, and support.