Microsoft accelerates Windows security update

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A Microsoft executive has said the company will launch Service Pack 2 for Windows XP in December, months earlier than the company forecast on its Service Pack roadmap. ( [Link mogu videti samo ulogovani korisnici] )

At the Citrix iForum in Florida on Tuesday, Microsoft's corporate vice president of content, Richard Kaplan, who is in charge of the Microsoft.com and Windows Update Web sites, told delegates that Windows XP SP2 would be available by the end of the year. The service pack was originally planned for this year, but had been put back to 2004.

Kaplan admitted that Microsoft's record on security has "not been good enough", but he claims the company is improving. Security is now the number one priority for Microsoft and that will be demonstrated with SP2, he said, revealing that the update will contain enhanced memory protection in an attempt to reduce the operating system's vulnerability to buffer overflow exploits. "One of the primary way worms get onto the system is by what they call a buffer overflow. There is a new technology that lets us lock out people's ability to install code in Windows using a buffer overflow," he said.

Additionally, SP2 will switch on Windows XP's built-in firewall by default and provide better control over ActiveX scripts: "Automatic downloading of ActiveX controls that you don't know about and don't care about -- we are going to make this much, much easier to control."

Kaplan also said that Microsoft will, except in extreme cases, only release patches once a month: "You should install patches on your schedule rather than our schedule," he said.

Munir Kotadia
ZDNet UK
October 15, 2003, 13:35 BST

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I bilo bi vreme da izađe SP2 za Windows XP, i onako je zbir svih patch-eva dostigao nekih 130 Mb kolko otprilike teži skoro svaki pravi SP.

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Confusion reigns over Windows XP SP2

Munir Kotadia
ZDNet UK

Just three days after a Microsoft vice president -- who is in charge of Microsoft.com and Windows Update -- told thousands of delegates at a conference in Florida that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP would be available by the end of 2003, the company has effectively retracted the comments and said that customers will see only a beta version of SP2 this year.

Richard Kaplan, vice president of content and delivery at Microsoft, made the statement during a talk to an audience of around 2,000 people at the Citrix iForum conference earlier this week, in which he explained why he believed that Windows Server 2003 was the best and fastest platform for Citrix MetaFrame users.

As part of Microsoft's overhaul of its security practices, he said patches would only be launched once a month and a "new version of Windows, called Windows XP SP2" would be available by the end of the year.

However, on Friday, Microsoft issued a statement saying that only a beta version of the service pack will be available this year, with the full version scheduled to be released mid-2004. "It is too early in the development cycle to provide a more specific timeline for its release," the company stated.

The service pack was originally scheduled for release this year, but in August Microsoft posted a schedule on its Web site indicating that it had been delayed.

Microsoft has also varied on the release schedule for Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP. Longhorn is scheduled for release in late 2005 or early 2006, although executives, including Bill Gates, have admitted that it will probably be late, according to reports. At the company's main partner conference earlier this month, several Microsoft executives said that the software would be released in three years' time, suggesting the release date is likely to be in 2006.

The release of Longhorn is important because several other flagship products, such as Visual Studio, Office 12 and Longhorn Server, are tied to the next-generation platform.

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Kakve su ovo gluposti sa beta verzijom SP2. Stvarno imaju fiks ideje, bože me sačuvaj njihovih gluposti. Ko izađe na kraj sa ovim silnim krpljenjem svaka mu čast. Dovoljno što imam posla preko glave još moram da razmišljam dal sam instalirao SP2 beta ili SP2 final.

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Ma ... M$ posla.