Don’t Buy Vista for Security?
Joris Evers at CNET (that’s his e-mail) is now saying that you don’t need to upgrade to Vista; just keep your Windows XP machine patched. He claims that experts support this claim. The headline says “Experts: Don’t buy Vista for the security”.
If you only read the headline and first two paragraphs of his article, you’ll get an extremely misleading picture. The fact is, a patched Windows XP SP2 machine is not even close to Windows Vista. The operating system with Vista now sandboxes the user at medium integrity, and the web browser is sandboxed at low integrity. These changes alone make any comparison between XP and Vista night and day. To act as if a user is just as secure on XP as on Vista is insane and irresponsible. Saying that someone will be “perfectly secure” is grossly negligent. I wouldn’t even claim that Vista is “perfectly secure”. I hope Joris is willing to take e-mails from all of the users who accept his advice.
And it’s his advice, not the advice of the experts he cites. The “expert” who says XP SP2 compares to Vista is a computer repair guy. The other person who says it’s not more secure is a student at some local college.
The actual experts Joris cites say the opposite. Too bad he buries the experts at the bottom of the article where most people don’t read. Quotes from four different experts he cites say:
- “Vista is light-years ahead of XP from a built-in security perspective”.
- “A lot of customers will prefer to either buy a new machine with Vista or upgrade a recently acquired XP machine with Vista in order to get at this added layer of protection”
- “XP SP2 was not the systemic, top-to-bottom, scrub-everything experience that Vista is, XP SP2 secured the surface. Vista security goes much deeper. It’s a far bigger leap.”
- “If you’re looking to buy a new computer, the security features built into Vista tip the balance in its favor over other options such as Mac OS X”
There you have it, four experts all say “Buy Windows Vista for the Security”. And two non-experts say don’t. So Joris tells you that “experts” think you shouldn’t buy Vista for the security.
I am sure Joris was just using provocative headlines to generate controversy. That’s why I’m not linking the story. Lying to people about security just to get on TechMeme is not cool.
September 18th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I prefer “completely stonking mad security”.
To this day no one in our IT department can work out how to get Vista to stop randomly denying media files permission to copy.
Which kind of shuts us down, as media creation is what we do.
I could go on about Vistas madness, but I won’t. It makes me depressed. At least for consolation, a friend who works at Microsoft told me that most Microsoft staffers don’t use it either for similar reasons. That means Vista will be fixed. One day, although a Year and a bit into vistas release, the clock is ticking.