From: "Geo." 

"Joe Barr"  wrote in message
news:3e368279$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
> I suppose by now you've read that MS was hit hard by Slammer, too. A quote
> from Robert Lemos's story by an MS spokesman:

yes I read all about it. It occurs to me that a big part of the problem
with how they are dealing with this problem is actually related to copy
protection. One of the things that causes all these unpatched machines to
continuously be available is that people are always doing new
installs/re-installs for whatever reasons. They are forced to use the
original CD which of course contains unpatched code, then apply service
pack and lord knows how many hot fixes. It's obvious from the effects this
has on the internet that these people have lots of bandwidth and it's also
obvious that this process is too complicated.

If there were no copy protection, it would be relatively easy and
inexpensive to make a new build available every time a security patch/batch
is released (increasing the version number each time by .0001 to make it
easy to know if you are current or not) that could be downloaded in iso
form and burned to a new CD allowing people to trash the defective product
they have on their purchased CD.

This works great for Knoppix, it's so simple to stay current, I do a
download and burn and I'm done. If microsoft could get past believing that
copy protection actually stops anyone from installing they could easily use
this to their advantage and make a real difference in how secure their
products appear. It's all the old software that's causing the problem,
nobody's installs the current builds because nobody's got a current install
CD, including the people working at MS..

Also the ISO should have 2 options, one to install, the other to patch so
you don't deal with service packs and hot fixes you just use the current
build CD to update your install then put the CD someplace safe. It's the
only workable system I can think of short of eliminating the bugs before
going GA which we all know is impossible.

If MS were to announce that copy protection were being discontinued in
order to fix the security issues via this current ISO method it would go a
long way to patching up relations with customers and at the same time
really show they are serious about solving these security patch issues and
put them on a competitive level with Linux as far as ease of getting the
current build.

Geo.

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