Fired consultant gets last laugh

COMPUTER CONSULTANT Dan Greer says that changes within Vista have finally vindicated his view that Microsoft's monopoly would create a security mess for the Internet.

Greer was forced to stand down from his chief technology officer job at consulting company @Stake in 2003 after he penned a report which blamed Microsoft's operating system monopoly and complex code base for all the Internet's woes.

The report "CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly" warned that software diversity was the key to securing the Internet and the only way to prevent "massive, cascading failures" was to avoid the Windows monoculture. Greer said that the risks associated with Microsoft's virtual monoculture are still the same today, but the business plan being adopted by Vole gives him a sense of "total vindication."

Vista has something called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomisation) which is a security feature that randomly arranges the positions of key data areas. It is designed to block the majority of buffer overflow tricks used in about two-thirds of all worm attacks.

According to Greer it means that it will create software diversity within a single operating system. It is showing that Microsoft recognises that software diversity is important.

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