Your Windows Is Vulnerable to Malware... And Microsoft Knew About It!

Microsoft has made public statistics on how many pieces of malware it has tracked on PCs since January 2005. The information can be found here.

According to the article, the company has a new "security czar" whose first, second, and third priorities are Windows Vista. There are several problems with this line of thought. First, Vista is not yet available as of this writing in production form, so no immediate benefit will be gained by the user community. Second, the hardware requirements for Vista--discussed elsewhere in this blog and here--are not economically reachable by all users. Third, Microsoft is apparently ignoring users of Windows 2000 and XP, probably stating "you'll need to upgrade" even though PCs running these earlier OSes are otherwise perfectly usable. Note to Microsoft: only techies might upgrade for the heck of it, but mainstream users can't afford that, since they don't have the "cash problem" you have (check out this article for more information).