| In an article with/from Information Week (an article from an e-mail news letter), it mentions that if MS does not or can not patch the security problems with its/their software, the USAF will consider other software. This could be an opportunity for those company(ies) that make alternative software for/of MS programs. ** Air Force Has A Mission For Microsoft As if Microsoft didn't have enough trouble with the government. Now an Air Force CIO is taking the vendor--and its competitors, too--to task, saying they need to step up their efforts to establish improved security standards. Coding errors in commercially developed software account for roughly 80% of successful system intrusions, says Air Force CIO John Gilligan. And hacks today may be aimed at causing more than bottom-line damage. "This is no longer an economic issue. This is clearly a national-security issue," Gilligan says. The cost and energy the Air Force is expending on dealing with coding flaws that are found almost every day, and which could create opportunities for hackers, is taking its toll. It's "rising very fast--approaching the point where we're spending more money to find, patch, and fix vulnerabilities than we paid for the software," he says. Microsoft doesn't necessarily have worse design problems than other vendors the Air Force buys products from, such as Cisco Systems and Oracle, but it's the largest IT supplier for the Air Force. So it has "the opportunity to show leadership in the industry," Gilligan says. Microsoft has helped set the right tone with chairman Bill Gates' internal memo advocating "trustworthy computing, [but] the key will be, what's the follow through?" Gilligan met last fall with Microsoft execs Rick Belluzzo and Howard Schmidt (now vice chairman of the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection Board) to discuss mounting security problems. The Air Force has instituted more rapid processes for patching, but it's no easy task to manage 400,000 desktops running Microsoft software. "We're not leaving Microsoft in a week or six months," Gilligan says. But if the company doesn't improve, the Air Force, with roughly a $6 billion IT budget, will weigh other software options, he says. "Even though Microsoft may have good functionality in products and the purchase price may be reasonable, the overall life-cycle cost and vulnerability may cause us to look at other products." - Sandra Swanson Search for secure computing Software's Challenge http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGOg0BdDXH0V20BVpd0AY Memo From Bill Gates http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGOg0BdDXH0V20BVpf0Aa TomLeeM PS (I was not sure of the url but I was able to copy the article and post it here - by giving credit to those who wrote it, I am hoping I will not get in trouble with them - in a way, it is free 'advertisement' for them ).
OS/2 Warp-ed to the very end.
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