Vista won't need anti-virus?

Microsoft suggest Windows Vista won't need an antivirus. Who are they kidding?

Co-President of Microsoft, Jim Allchin, is reported to have claimed Vista won't need an anti-virus. His seven year old surfs the net all the time and using the parental controls feature, Jim doesn't have to worry about AV. If he believes that, he's kidding himself.

My kids surf the net all the time using an XP computer. It never gets viruses because they use Firefox and they run as restricted users. When they go to virus or spyware infected sites, the malware simple cannot run.

That's not to say the malware sites don't try. AVG constantly picks up trojan attempts in the cache file. But they simply don't get on the system.

Vista almost certainly will be more secure than XP, just as XP was more secure than 98 and ME. However XP could have been as secure as the Mac had Microsoft not decided to make all users Administrators by default. Make the users limited and the bulk of the problems go away, thankfully Vista appears to do this, although in practice it might be different.

We'll see how secure Vista is in the next few months. But right now it's sounding like we have a lot of complex kludges like parental controls and Address Space Layout Randomization. All these seem nice ideas, but they are just adding to the complexity of an already complex system.

The real solutions to Windows' security problems are for normal users not to have administrator rights and to deny access to the registry and system 32 folder. There is no reason why any program should have to write to either for normal usage. Until this is done, then Windows will continue to have problems.

It's a shame someone like Jim Allchin would make such a silly statement. Of course Vista will still need an anti-virus. I doubt even the stock brokers and analysts are fooled by this sort of talk.