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Microsoft: less vulnerabilities in Vista AND XP than Mac OX Tiger

By | July 27, 2007, 4:37pm PDT

Summary: Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner implicitly claimed yesterday that Vista and XP are safer than Apple’s Mac OS Tiger. As expressed during a conference call with analysts, Turner noted that “there have been just 12 serious vulnerabilities reported with Vista over the first 180 days versus 25 for Windows XP over the same period. This [...]

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Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner implicitly claimed yesterday that Vista and XP are safer than Apple’s Mac OS Tiger.

As expressed during a conference call with analysts, Turner noted that “there have been just 12 serious vulnerabilities reported with Vista over the first 180 days versus 25 for Windows XP over the same period. This number is also lower than for Apple and other operating systems. We have also seen 21 percent fewer support calls for Vista versus XP over the same period,” he said.

Compare that with the more than 50 flaws fixed in the first six months of Mac OX Tiger. Several of these flaws were security threats.

“Apple does not assess the danger of each threat,” notes Farhad Manjoo, chief writer for Salon.com’s Machinist website, “so it’s unclear how many would have been comparable with the flaws Turner is counting in Vista.

But are you counting?

Poll

Vista and XP Safer Than OX Tiger?

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Disclosure

Russell Shaw

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?page_id=1879

Biography

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw passed away in March 2008. He was an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. A specialist in open source architectures and strategies, Microsoft applications, wireless networking, and multimedia content creation, Russell covered these fields regularly for several IT, business and consumer publications, including Investor's Business Daily and the syndicated IT news site NewsFactor.com.

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RE: Microsoft: less vulnerabilities in Vista AND XP than Mac OX Tiger
ydrahmas 21st Nov 2008
I first used Vista Basic as a dual boot on my XP Pro machine and hated it. It performed so slowly in a side by side comparison that I removed it post haste. Five months back, I bought a new HP using a faster AMD dual core with 3 gigs of ram running Vista Premium. It has run like a fast sewing machine without the first hitch, even with the initial crapware loaded by the manufacturer. The difference is night and day. Keep in mind, I was and still am an XP fan, but I also appreciate the new faster machine and Vista Premium.
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Isn't this
April May 27th Jul 2007
common knowledge. devil
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It should be
Fil0403 29th Jul 2007
but some people don't like to face facts. happy
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Safer?!
Kobashrer 27th Jul 2007
"Microsoft?s chief operating officer Kevin Turner implicitly claimed yesterday that Vista and XP are safer than Apple?s Mac OS Tiger."

They did it to excess for many users the security warnings are a nightmare endless loops to accomplish a simple install they even made the Vista box so secure People have a tough time opening it!

When they mean cancel or allow they aren't kidding.






When they mean 'cancel or allow?' Microsoft isn't kidding.
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Yes, safer.
Fil0403 29th Jul 2007
That's an interesrying recurring comment, given UAC is basically the same acclaimed feature that so many people never complained about being present in Mac OS X and Linux.
But do you by any chance know a feature called "Disable UAC"? I not, because it would be probably the first time anyone would have bashed a Microsoft product while actually knowing what he/she was talking about.
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140,000 Viruses to None: Case Closed (NT)
helzapoppin 28th Jul 2007
Microsoft, the convicted criminal that sabotaged competitors, extorted competitors
AND partners (Intel), was convicted twice for it and has cost businesses billions
upon billions of dollars due to Y2K problems, viruses, etc.

We're going to believe anything they say? Aren't they the same company that said 1
Million Zunes were sold?

You gotta love MS; they are fading fast and having their lunch fed to them by Apple
and Google. If it wasn't for the huge amounts of campaign funds they gave to Bush
and Ashcroft, they would've been broken up by now and fighting just to stay alive.

Imagine if any other company came out with the xBox and lost billions? They'd be
out of business by now!!
Microsft, the world's biggest software company, always had a philosiphy of full disclosure regarding security vulnerabilities in their products (unlike other companies from Cuppertino California that prefer to deny them and "quickly" fix them 6 months later), have always friendly colaborated with security researchers (instead of threatning them like some company from Cupertino California likes to do) and has "cost" businesses trillions upon trillions of dollars in savings and renevue thanks to products like Vista, that provenly make businesses and people more productive and of which the industry gets more revenue per each copy sold than own Microsoft itself, studies prove; ABMs (Anything But Microsofts) like you, on the other hand, the ignorant short-minded idiots that bash anything that is remotely related to Microsoft, tried to skew facts and figures that prove Vista to be safer than Mac OS Tiger and Linux and made up fantasy stories of Microsoft sabotages, convictions, bugs, viruses, etc.

"We're going to believe anything they say?"

No, you don't need to believe anything they say, you just need to know something called Mathematics and compare numbers; but what do you think, then, we're going to believe anything you Microsoft-haters say instead of believeing in facts and figures?


"Aren't they the same company that said 1 Million Zunes were sold?"

Yes, and, akwardly enough, they are the same company that sold 1 million Zunes too (can you imagine the coincidence?); and aren't you the same ones too that said Vista was going to be a flop and have as many security vulnerabilities as XP or even more?

You gotta love Microsoft-haters; they are running out of lame arguments and excuses to justify the facts they don't want to hear and running out of fantasy stories of Microsoft fading (I think Microsoft is supposedly fading since 1995 and, yet, every new Windows and Office release is a success and every year their revenue grows, LOL). If it wasn't for their bias, ignorance and idiocy, people wouldn't even find them funny, LOL.


"Imagine if any other company came out with the xBox and lost billions? They'd be
out of business by now!!"

Actually there's a small unknown japanese company called Sony who came out with a console called PS3 and lost trillions and (no matter how bad they are) they're not exactly out of business now. But I guess idiots like you are not aware of how successful the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live are (they're actually the market leaders, did you know?), how much revenue they are starting to get from them; but thanks for proving Microsoft's power and leadership, I guess for idiots like you, having money is meaning of bad products.
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Validity of counting method?
daboochmeister 29th Jul 2007
Previous vulnerability count comparisons from MS wrt/ Linux have had a fatal flaw in that they counted vulnerabilities in non-OS software (e.g., MySQL, Apache, PHP) because it's delivered w/ the Linux distro, but didn't include comparable vulnerability counts on the Microsoft side.

I've searched, but can't find out -- does anyone know if there are any questionable assumptions like that in this case?
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>17 million Win XP viruses
trentreviso 30th Jul 2007
There are now more than 17 million known viruses for Windows XP alone. There is one sort-of virus known for the Mac (if you count the proof-of-concept "Macarena" virus). Yet Microsoft would have us believe XP is more secure than OS X, based on a bizarre assessment scheme cooked up by the most potentially biased source one could imagine: Microsoft itself.

It is beyond absurd to accept any part of this nonsense. It is very much as if the Bush administration were to announce the results of a study they had conducted, proving George W. Bush to be the greatest leader in world history, with Richard M. Nixon coming in a close second. Even if such a counter-intuitive argument were somehow true, the very source of such "analysis" removes any validity.

I believe Microsoft does far more damage to their cause when they try to sell us such obvious deception than if they were simply to keep their mouths shut. They make themselves appear desperate, and make the rest of us wonder if perhaps Vista is such a terribly bad product that they can't find anything better to say about it that is both believable and true.
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MS is doing slight of hand and smoke an mirrors to try to try to make themselves
look better.

go do a search and you will see there are no OSX vulnerabilities with exploits in the
wild (not talking about some half baked thing that some researcher cooked up in
their mom's basement)... NONE.. Apple manages to to patch all vulnerabilities long
before there are exploits. this is the big difference between Apple and MS... with
Windows you have a system with unpatched vulnerabilities with exploits in the wild...
this is what makes it less safe than OSX

there's a difference between vulnerabilities and exploits and exploits in the wild...
only the last one is actually dangerous... don't be naive... don't believe MS bull
shiznit... vulnerabilities are a red herring... the fact that you will never hear MS talk
about exploits proves they are absolutely full of it because this is absolutely what
determines if you are safe or unsafe and this is what Windows has millions of and
OSX has almost none and none unpacted in the wild... MS can't make that claim so
they will continue to talk about the vulnerabilities red herring... don't be fooled by
their slight of hand... they are full of it.
I first used Vista Basic as a dual boot on my XP Pro machine and hated it. It performed so slowly in a side by side comparison that I removed it post haste. Five months back, I bought a new HP using a faster AMD dual core with 3 gigs of ram running Vista Premium. It has run like a fast sewing machine without the first hitch, even with the initial crapware loaded by the manufacturer. The difference is night and day. Keep in mind, I was and still am an XP fan, but I also appreciate the new faster machine and Vista Premium.

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