New Windows exploit: "Shatter"

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by headsplice
Actually, it was Windows 2000, now that I look back at articles and discussions. My apologies for the error. Yes, it took lots and lots of man-hour-years to rebuild Windows.

I'll make my case once more and then let this die. They did not rebuild Windows for 2000. They didn't rebuild it for XP. One could argue that the original Windows NT was rebuilt, but that was hardly "from the ground up", since it had to have a considerable degree of backwards compatibility with previous Windows versions.

The low-level API message passing structure, which is the cause of this problem, remained largely the same when they wrote NT. It had to be, and has to be, because otherwise Windows programs would stop working.

But regardless, my point is that your frustration at Microsoft not "plugging this hole" is unfounded. Be pissed because they wrote a crappy OS with such a shaky foundation. Be pissed because they try to extend thier desktop-OS monopoly into every other market. Be pissed that there's no OS-level mechanism for preventing crappy programs like AOL from spewing shit all over your desktop and rearranging your file extensions. But you can't be pissed that they're not fixing this problem, because as the article points out, it's pretty much unfixable.

If you still want to state that they rewrote Windows from scratch, please provide links to the articles you're using for reference.