Five year old Windows bug resurfaces
A FIVE year old bug, which is only a problem for PCs outside the US, has resurfaced.
According to Associated Press, Volish engineers were working frantically through-out the Thanksgiving holiday break to come up with a patch for the defect.
The bug was demonstrated at the Kiwicon hacker conference in New Zealand last week by an ethical hacker, Beau Butler. The hole makes it easy for a hacker to take control of vast numbers of home or office PCs around the world in a single attack.
Butler found more than 160,000 computers in NZ were vulnerable. Out of a population of four million, excluding sheep and kiwi fruit who do not own a PC, that number is fairly significant.
Details of the hack have not been printed on the world wide wibble yet because Microsoft have admitted that the security hole is very serious.
Vole first had a look at the problem five years ago and came up with a fix. However it was only a partial fix and depended on how the computer was configured. It also applies to Vista. ยต
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"Details of the hack have not been printed on the world wide wibble yet because Microsoft have admitted that the security hole is very serious."

Probably the details havn't been posted because the ethical hacker who knows them has decided against it.

Any other hacker would have those details circulating online in no time, or in even less time if Microsoft deemed the probelem 'serious'.
How many times have I heard that Vista was coded from scratch ? So, they specifically coded in the old holes as well then ?
How nice of them to prop up the anti-virus industry like that.
Too bad Vista "security" takes another broadside in the process.
No, they didnt change anything. They just repacked most of the stuff from xp. And added a ton of DRM code. That Im sure they worked really hard cos the big media pays a lot of dough for it. 
Other than that I think the government of the usa has some interest in Microsoft's product being so bad. Otherwise they really should look into whats going on and punish this company. Or is it that too many people in the government had their campaines sponsored by Microsoft?
This is y this country is way behind europe. you want quality, you buy german. people in usa are not concerned bout quality but pure profit. nobody is a patriot. country is going to heck:(
Indeed the 'vista is 100% new' thing has been debunked myriads of times now, and yet MS still has fanboys who STILL buy into it.
Where did you hear that Vista was 100% from scratch code? Pieces of it where done from scratch, but a lot of it was code used in previous generations. One of the few I can think of off the top of my head is the display code. They scrapped the old code and redid it. It was a holdover from the windows 3.x days, maybe older. Vista code breaks down into 3 categories, well 2 really. New sections coded from scratch, old sections with newer code (mostly older code), or legacy code that was lopped off (hence why only really 2 categories).

I never once saw or heard Microsoft say that Vista was completely new code from the bottom up. If you can find a press statement from Microsoft saying so please link it. Probably most of the people spouting that crap didn't know what the hell they where talking about, or took the new sections coded from scratch blurb and twisting it around. I mean really. If Vista had been completely from scratch with no old code used, development time would have been doubled easily.
Is it realisitc to think that this one "ethical hacker" is the only person on the planet who noticed this flaw?

Sometimes you gotta wonder if this kind of action.. as nice and clean as it sounds doesn't do much to save the good guys from the bad guys.

We now know that the good guys (us) have not been given the details... but the bad guys who know of thisflaw and have been using it now have time to do workarounds or to cover their tracks before the good guys get the word.

Is it REALLY a good idea to make sure that an unknown number of bad guys are given warning their favorite flaw is being patched while a very finite number of good guys work to solve the problem???

I think that too often this seemingly good idea of keeping a flaw` secret allows an embarassed software house to cover its tracks and to, probably, mischaracterize just how bad it might have been.

In the Open Solurce community you have more good guys than bad guys working on each problem.

In the proprietary world you have more bad guys than good guys working to close security holes.