Once every couple of months someone claims that product x is better than product y based on absolutely no legitimate evidence and every time the argument is the same. This time around, Jeff Jones, a security expert who works for Microsoft, is claiming on his blog that Windows Vista is the most secure operating system of all the modern operating systems (which, by the way, does include Linux, specifically a version of both Red Hat and Ubuntu.) The headline is great, but the argument does not stand up to, well, anything.

In this comparison, the metric for security is the number of reported bugs. It does not matter if they have been fixed or not, it does not matter what the level of severity is, and there is no adjustment for the fact that Microsoft or Apple might not report all the bugs that exist, while in open-source software, almost any bug that anyone finds is reported. Do I even need to say any more?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Fun, Other OSs, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.