Security numerology and the art of insult…

[nontroppo]

ZDNet published the following analysis by George Ou and Larry Dignan:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=758

So this shows that Apple had more than 5 times the number of flaws per month than Windows XP and Vista in 2007, and most of these flaws are serious.

This of course raised the ire of the pitbull Daniel Eran Dilger, who has previously awarded Ou a zoon award, and in his usual derisory manner rips through Ou's piece at length:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/20/vista-vs-mac-os-x-security-why-george-ous-zdnet-vulnerability-numerology-is-absurd/

Not knowing where the missing floorboards are doesn’t make you secure as you walk about in the dark. Having Ou wave a flashlight in your face doesn’t help; instead, it makes it more likely that you’ll fall through the floor and into the dark cold basement of Windows. That’s Ou’s intention, and it fits ZDNet’s business model, because Microsoft pays it to lure people into expensive catastrophe and entrapment using the misleading distractions of FUD.

If you overcome the personal attacks, the piece is quite interesting in its reflection of why open source software appears more vulnerable than Windows, at least through meaningless and misrepresented statistics.

[f0dder]

"Tell me the results you want, and I'll create the matching graphs for you" - that's what statistics are all about.

It's funny how actual numbers are called absurd, though.

I stopped reading the article about 1/6th through, it has the same kind of language use and bleh as http://www.theregister.co.uk/, gets old pretty damn fast.