A Russian hacker and a California-based security team, Determina, have already found a user privilege enhancing hack as well as a number of IE 7 problems in the current version of Vista. The flaw allows users to increase security levels on any account and run code as an administrator.
“I don’t think people should become complacent,” said Nand Mulchandani, a vice president at Determina. “When vendors say a program has been completely rewritten, it doesn’t mean that it’s more secure from the get-go. My expectation is we will see a whole rash of Vista bugs show up in six months or a year.”
While a few major bugs are to be expected at launch, it’s quite heartening to see that Vista is insecure right out of the box, ensuring users will have to patch, patch, and re-patch until New Year’s. Ready for a new day, indeed.
Flaws Are Detected in Microsoft’s Vista [NYTimes]
Six months to a year? I give Vista six weeks. Six. And I agree, John – it’s sad to hear that an OS not only insecure from the get-go, but those security flaws weren’t found by MS themselves. Personally, I’d think that MS would – should – look into co-oping with these people before releasing a “new” OS; speaking from an editing POV. At the very least, make it seem like a win-win situation for both sides (kinda like the bounty on hacking Nintendo DS WiFi…except that wasn’t done by Nintendo).
Isaiah, you can’t say this is a surprise can you? Common… this is Microsoft we are talking about whose list of flaws probably is larger then Santas Gift List ;-)
I am not upgrading to Vista probably for 2 years – let them sort out what is what and get some of the major bugs out of the way… XP is finally stable and working great… why upgrade all over again? Especially when I got a laptop, apparently Vista is a resource monster.
Jon
This is stupid. MS never said Vista will not have problems. All OS has them. OS X seems that it doe snot have as many but thats because hardly anyone uses it so the motivation to go after it is much less. So please get a life.
Ok, Rohit, whatever…..
Seriously, I do think perhaps we are being a bit hard on Vista. I mean, I have been a long term linux user ever since I started a Linux User Group in college, so I am usually the first to jump on the Anti-MS bandwagon.
However, any OS right out of the box is going to run into a usual stream of bugs and issues, security holes, etc. That is standard and to be expected. And the higher the scrutiny on the OS (or application, for that matter), the more people will be looking for those issues.
In the long run, the question is NOT whether there are bugs and holes. The REAL question is: How fast will those holes get fixed and how straightforward will the patch process be.
If they get things taken care of quickly and easily, I will be quite pleased.
And I, for one, will be more then glad to upgrade to Vista (perhaps if I decide to throw the money down for it). I tried a beta back in the summer and very much liked many of the new features, particularly from my point of view as a photography geek.