Today I finally found in my news reader an article that discusses a credible vulnerability in Windows Vista with Service Pack 1. Windows Vista really has been reasonably secure thus far… most vulnerabilities have taken very sophisticated attacks to exploit and have been terribly threatening in general. However this one could in fact be a big problem if it gets out into the wild. Basically, any visitor who visits a website that is hosting a malformed video file and plays it through their browser could have the attacker gain complete administrator control of their machine. VERY SCARY (so as always, be careful the sites you are visiting).

Here’s the thing… the video files/player causing the problem are Apple’s QuickTime. If you have iTunes on your computer you have QuickTime, and QuickTime has a very distinguished history of security vulnerabilities (not mention poor performance in my opinion). So thank you Apple for creating the latest, “critical” Windows vulnerability.

Not to rag on Apple all the time, but it just seems to me that if stuff like this is going to continue to come up, the “I’m a Mac I’m a PC” commercials should be amended in the spirit of ethical advertising.

PC: “Hi Mac”
Mac: “Hi PC, I see you’re feeling sick again today”
PC: “Yeah, suffering from a serious virus… very contagious”
Mac: “That’s terrible PC”
PC: “Yeah, I know. Thanks for passing on it on from the 12 of you to the millions of us”

My Apple bashing for today is finished, but here is a link to the Computerworld article. After my last couple of posts you would think I’m a real Windows bigot but for the record, I just installed two Ubuntu Linux desktops. I am actually a closet Linux/open source bigot, but more on that on a different day.

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