Managed World

 Link to Microsoft gets good reception at Black Hat | CNET News.com

I found this rather interesting. Of course, it was a small sampling of attendees and there were some others that thought it was just a huge sales pitch. Nonetheless, I'm please to see Microsoft going out and leveraging the skills of some of the best hackers out there to make Vista a more secure operating system.

Is anyone else watching this show on SciFi? Unfortunately, I missed the two-hour pilot. I have caught all shows since then. You know what? I'm addicted. One of the things I have always loved about SciFi is when it deals with Technology. This is why I was such a big fan of the Star Trek: TNG (heck, although I hate to admit it, I was also a closet-fan of Star Trek: Voyager). To me, Eureka captures this same "feel" that I got from TNG. The geek in me weeps with envy over the elaborate use of Technology. However, the story lines and characters aren't too cheesy either.

All I know is that after the cancellation of a show like Firefly (how can people NOT like that show for goodness sakes?!?!?), Eureka BETTER NOT get canceled or I will be forever disappointed with the American, TV-watching public (after all, how is Survivor still around yet a show like The Mole gets canceled?).

If you want to get a hint of the flavor of Eureka, check out this website put together by SciFi (it's classic Eureka): http://www.scifi.com/eureka/madeineureka/.

Here is my "Rant Of The Day": Why in the world does it take longer to install Visual Studio 2005 than it takes to install the entire operating system? My goodness, you would think that it could at least be comparable. This is horrible. It's like with each new release of Visual Studio it gets worse too.

On the bright side, when I'm installing Visual Studio 2005, I have enough time to get a cup of coffee, go to a movie with the misses, and read the entire novel War And Peace. Okay, I admit that might be an exaggeration. Not by much though, I swear :P. Don't even get me started on the time it takes to uninstall it. Wow, truly tremendous.

I suppose I should give a disclaimer first. I absolutely love Visual Studio 2005 as a product, I do, I promise. The install process is abysmal though. I feel like if I were to go to hell, my penance would be having to install Visual Studio 2005 over, and over, and over, and over, and over, forever and ever, amen. I can't close it without at least one Chandler-ism though (if you're not a Friends fan, you can safely ignore this): Could Installing Visual Studio _BE_ any longer?

Yikes!

Last night I upgraded to one of the newest internal builds of Windows Vista and, wow, it's definitely gone through some more polish. Problems I had on previous builds are gone (for the most part (not that there aren't some other new problems around having some questionable drivers)) and here I am actually posting from Vista. Sexy, sexy, sexy. It is shaping up to be one sexy product, that's for sure. There have definitely been quite the number of performances made between the first Beta 2 and the build I'm currently running on (it's fast, baby). (I honestly wonder what Scoble would think if he was able to see this latest build).

That reminds me, did y'all catch the news of what Mark Russinovich is working on now that he's a Microsoftie as well? Quoted from Mark himself: "For the near future I’ll be working with the client performance team analyzing and addressing Vista performance issues." That's pretty exciting to me. And with his skills, I'm sure it won't take long until he starts making an impact in that area.

I guess in one way, it's the small things that make me happy. The new screensavers, the new transparent windows in Aero, the new WindowsKey+Tab feature. My goodness, you HAVE to check out the new tabbing functionality once are up and running on RC1 of Vista when it comes out (you ARE going to upgrade, right?). I think I spent most of last night just tabbing through all my applications. It's a 3d view of your windows from a semi-side perspective, and all the transparencies are still there. Not only that, all the windows are still active. So, let's say I have a flash movie running in one window. If I activate the new tabbing window, the perspective will change AND the movie will continue to play. Very cool stuff!

Anyways, yeah, it's the small things that make me happy. That's not to say there are only small changes. Just you wait and see until you get your hands on all the new security/stability improvements in this version of Windows. In the sense that XP was a big step up from Windows 98, I think Vista is also going to be a big step up from XP. Remember though, this is just my opinion though :P.

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All this week, I've been at an internal Microsoft conference. Today, I attended a session that definitely got me excited. The session was given by a Product Manager on the Directory Services team. The topic covered the new Directory Services features coming with Longhorn Server. One of the new features that got me jazzed was the new Read-Only Domain Controller role. It is basically exactly like it sounds.

By default, an RODC doesn't actually store any passwords ("user secrets"). Not only that, but the replication is unidirectional so an RODC won't replicate any information back to the primary domain controller. These features in-turn reduce the attack surface of a Windows Server.

The story that is trying to be won with this new feature in this release is the Branch Office story. Basically, for a company that is large enough to have branch offices (where physical security might not be as strong), instead of deploying a fully blown domain controller, you can now deploy a read-only domain controller. This ensures that if the remote domain controller is compromised, that the entire AD forest is not compromised (since by default, there is very little chance that a username/password combination is cached that could be used to compromise the rest of the domain).

Combine this new features with the new "Server Core" installation option, and you come one step closer to a true "domain appliance." What is Server Core? Server Core is an install path of Longhorn Server (as of Beta 2) that does not install the unnecessary components of the OS (like the GUI or applications like Internet Explorer (after all, why in the world would I need Internet Explorer on a Server?!?!?)). Not only does this further reduce the attack surface of Windows Server, it also will minimize the amount of patching and maintenance that is required. This is something that the Linux/Unix servers have been doing great for a while, so I'm happy to see Windows Server finally catching up in this space!

I'm thinking once I settle into a permanent home up here in the Seattle area, I may very well end up using Longhorn Server at home to actually build up my own personal Domain at home (which I haven't done to date since I haven't really known all that much about maintaining/hardening servers; and seeing that Longhorn Server is significantly hardened by default and I can use Server Core to reduce the attack surface even more, I might as well get started :D).

Exciting times ahead of us, indeed.