Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: windows future
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:26:27 -0400
On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:09:55 BST, lsi said:
The biological metaphor does suggest that Microsoft would take some kind of evasive action, and I think their only option is to license unix, just as Apple did (although Apple did it for different reasons). Doing this will solve many problems, they can keep their proprietary interface and their reputation, and possibly even their licensing and marketing models, while under the hood, unix saves the day.
Unlikely to work - there's just Too Damned Many legacy binaries that have all sorts of dependencies on undocumented quirks of the Windows APIs. So you end up needing to use a Wine-like shim to provide the API the binaries need - and if the shim is good enough for the backward-combatable binaries, it's *also* good enough for the malware to attack. If IE9 has a bug and some Javascript scribbles something into the 'Documents' folder, that Javascript really doesn't care if it's a Documents folder on a real Windows box, or one that's in a directory being managed by a shim on a Unix/Linux box. All it cares about is that it *behaves* like a Documents folder. Hint: If a Windows user's home directory is on a remote file share, it really doesn't care if it's a Genuine Windows(TM) or a Samba share, does it? Heck, it doesn't even know/care if its domain controller is Windows or Samba. All it cares is that the file share and the DC *act* like Windows. And unfortunately, that's true for both legitimate binaries and malware.
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Current thread:
- windows future lsi (Aug 27)
- Re: windows future lsi (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future Rohit Patnaik (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future lsi (Aug 29)
- Re: windows future Peter Ferrie (Aug 29)
- Re: windows future Valdis . Kletnieks (Aug 31)
- Re: windows future Rohit Patnaik (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future Paul Schmehl (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future Rohit Patnaik (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future Paul Schmehl (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future Rob Thompson (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future lsi (Aug 28)
- Re: windows future lsi (Aug 29)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: windows future Robinson DELAUGERRE (Aug 29)
- Re: windows future Elazar Broad (Aug 30)
- Re: windows future Elazar Broad (Aug 30)