so is Vista security ruined or not?

You may have read that at a recent black hat conference a paper was presented which exposed some flaws in Vista security. Many blogs have been posted about this such as this one by Adrian Kingsly Hughes http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2387 which are saying in effect that Vista's much touted security is now busted and useless. This blog is written by a guy who knows little about the details of security himself and who is reporting what someone else said about a paper that that person admits to not having read himself. It's the usual blog sensationalism where a few page views are happily exchanged for any semblance of the truth.

Ed Bott countered the hysteria here http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=512 but not content with that he then contacted one of the two authors of the study, Alexander Sotirov, and published the interview here
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=513

Here is a quote from Sotirov himself:

It's amazing how this blog phenomenon works. You can blog anything you like, because it's not 'journalism' - other tech people read the headlines and report them, often as quickly as humanly possible while the BS is still hot, such as Leo Leporte did about this story, not exactly endorsing it but subtly propagating it, and before you know it the blogosphere is ablaze with BS. The quality of tech writing and blogging is atrocious - it's woefully inaccurate, sensationalized and agenda driven. Everybody and his mother is jumping on the bandwagon and I'd wager not even 10% of them are even qualified to speak jack about the suibject. It's TECH!

Good detailed article about it here at Arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/po [...] ypass.html