Comments on: The Government speaks out… http://www.getsafeonlineblog.org/the-government-speaks-out News, tips and updates from the GetSafeOnline.org team Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:39:29 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: MJ Ray http://www.getsafeonlineblog.org/the-government-speaks-out/comment-page-1#comment-453160 MJ Ray Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:21:08 +0000 http://www.getsafeonlineblog.org/?p=485#comment-453160 I feel it's a bit weak telling people to keep up to date when they have a choice of only one source of updates and that single source is known to be worse than competitors. A 1999 analysis by SecurityPortal found that little Red Hat was faster to respond to advisories and vulnerabilities than Microsoft (11.23 days on average, compared to 16.10 days) and I've seen nothing suggesting that has changed significantly, have you? Way back in June 2004, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recommended switching browsers for security reasons after Microsoft had failed to patch a critical vulnerability for 9 months. http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3374931 So, this is not the first time this has happened and not a new problem. When will the UK Government honour European Parliament A5-0264/2001 which calls "on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes"? I feel it’s a bit weak telling people to keep up to date when they have a choice of only one source of updates and that single source is known to be worse than competitors. A 1999 analysis by SecurityPortal found that little Red Hat was faster to respond to advisories and vulnerabilities than Microsoft (11.23 days on average, compared to 16.10 days) and I’ve seen nothing suggesting that has changed significantly, have you?

Way back in June 2004, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recommended switching browsers for security reasons after Microsoft had failed to patch a critical vulnerability for 9 months. http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3374931

So, this is not the first time this has happened and not a new problem. When will the UK Government honour European Parliament A5-0264/2001 which calls “on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes”?

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