MS XP SP2 CD Free

drawmack

Microsoft is shipping out sp2 for free:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

planetsim

Suppose they should it was there fault that it was buggy in the first place and people should expect something that works.

LordShryku

Not yet...

drawmack

Intersting Article Shryku

Weedpacket

One thing I found unfortunate was something in Microsoft's documentation covering the changes in SP2.

Data Execution Prevention
Data execution prevention (DEP) is a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on memory to help protect against malicious code exploits. In Windows XP SP2, DEP is enforced by both hardware and software.
Hardware-enforced DEP
Hardware-enforced DEP marks all memory locations in a process as non-executable unless the location explicitly contains executable code. There is a class of attacks that attempt to insert and execute code from non-executable memory locations. DEP helps prevent these attacks by intercepting them and raising an exception.
....
Both Advanced Micro Devices™ (AMD) and Intel® Corporation have defined and shipped Windows-compatible architectures that are compatible with DEP.

Software-enforced DEP
An additional set of data execution prevention security checks have been added to Windows XP SP2. These checks, known as software-enforced DEP, are designed to mitigate exploits of exception handling mechanisms in Windows.

"Malicious code exploits" is presumably Microsoft-speak for "Exploits of security holes caused by braindamaged buffer overflow bugs in our code." And now Intel and AMD are having to help haul Microsoft's conkers out of the fire.

drawmack

DEP doesn't protect against assembler level code jumps though, as far as I know.

Sxooter

Please don't tell me you expect genuine security from the company that brought you ActiveX technology.

drawmack

Originally posted by Sxooter
Please don't tell me you expect genuine security from the company that brought you ActiveX technology.

LOL

Want a good laugh:
PC World reports that Microsoft recommends user's turn off javascript in IE. However doing this will break the windows update site and you can't access this site with any other browser.

Though you will be protected against this under XP2

Which leads us too: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1639276,00.asp