The Small Wave.

Just as they did at the 90, 180, and 270-day mark, Microsoft has cherry-picked and juggled statistics to arrive at the conclusion that Vista is more secure than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Oh please.

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TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld provides an indication of why Business 2.0 went under with a post on Apple that claims Apple is thinking like the phone company and Jobs should “think different.” For any writer to imply the iPhone is something the phone companies would ever have produced is reason enough to ignore the post completely.

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I wrote about Microsoft’s latest security ploy last month (link at the end of this article). This is a “prequel” to that piece…

For the six years prior to January of this year, these were the perceptions about Microsoft Windows’ security:

1) It is weak.
2) XP SP2 is going to fix it.
3) It is weak.
4) Internet Explorer 7.0 is going to fix it.
5) It is weak.
6) Vista is going to fix it.

Those are simple, but they sum it up well.

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Well, I’m back from the “out of town” portion of my vacation. I still have a few days off and some projects planned at home, but I’ll get to blogging as well. For my first post since coming back I’ll highlight some of the stuff that went on while I was gone. This is stuff I may have written complete posts about had I been here.

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Just as it did last quarter, Microsoft’s own security report says Vista is more secure than other operating systems.

In order to pull this off, Microsoft had to redefine how to measure security. In their world it isn’t about actual attacks, but rather a game of statistical juggling.

You know the saying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Can we get back to reality? What matters are actual attacks in the wild. Was my system compromised (applications act funny, popups from nowhere, lost data, system degraded, crashes)? That’s what users care about. By this obvious measure Windows has always been a virus and malware magnet. There’s no denying this. It’s why antivirus and anti-malware software is a requirement on a Windows system (including Vista). No reputable party disputes this. No wonder Microsoft had to redefine security metrics!

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According to Google’s online security blog, their initial review of “suspicious” URLs has revealed one million malware-infected sites.

Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, according to them it’s basically good news:

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