The lie that is Windows Vista

Microsoft has been making a lot of claims as to how much more secure Windows Vista is than any previous Windows. This is a complete lie.

The thing that amazes me is how many foolish people have jumped mindlessly on this security bandwagon. What frustrates and shocks me is that many of these people should know better!

I suppose it shouldn't really surprise me, since a lot of people have been impressed by the alleged security of so-called personal firewalls for many years now. Microsoft just took the nonsense that vendors such as Norton were using and applied it to the entire operating system.

As a result, the biggest change between Windows XP and Windows Vista is the amount of nonsense in the code.

See, with a personal firewall, the theory is that when a malicious program tries to establish a network connection, the user can decide whether or not they want to allow that to happen. The major flaw in that plan is that the average user isn't computer-literate enough to make that decision.

How many computer users out there know whether or not they want to allow UDP traffic on port 161? Raise your hands. How many of you with your hands up are mightily educated computer geeks? How many of you computer geeks already know enough about computers not to have security problems anyway? Those of you with your hands still up can leave the room -- the 98% of you who are left are not going to see any benefit from Vista's improved security.

Here's what happens -- user installs Vista or gets a computer with it pre-installed. At some point, Vista asks the user some obscure and frightening question, like, "setup.exe is about to perform actions that could damage your computer." Now, this user might not be computer-literate, but he's not stupid. He clicks "no" because he doesn't want setup.exe damaging his computer. Huh ... now his install of Computertainment2000 has failed.

Next time he gets asked a similar question, he's clicking "yes". And he'll do that every time, because he's not knowledgeable enough to differentiate between when he should click yes and no. And all too often, when he clicks "no", something he's trying to do gets aborted.

Now, you may think that I take Microsoft for fools. "Surely, Bill," you're saying to your web browser right now (in spite of the fact that I can't hear you through the Internet) "The engineers at Microsoft aren't that stupid. There's something you're missing. Windows Vista's new 'ask me to shoot my own foot' system really is more secure."

The reality is that you've simply been fooled into believing the lie. The lie is that Vista is more secure.

The reality is that Vista is designed so it will never be Microsoft's fault if your computer has problems again. After all, you told the computer that it was OK to install that virus.

It worked for the personal firewall vendors, it'll work for Vista. Microsoft will make bajillions of dollars selling Vista to people who think it's more secure.

But the Internet won't be any safer. Hell, as of this writing there have already been some serious security flaws published about Vista, and it's only been a few months. Vista is just business as usual for Microsoft.

Good luck out there. You're going to need it.