People who say Windows is insecure aren't comparing it to Flash or Java, they are comparing it to OS X, Linux, or *BSD. Without addressing that comparison, this article is useless.
This stuff is hard to pin down; for instance, there's a lot of hardening you can (but most people do not) do on Linux, and Lion changes the game on countermeasures for OS X. So it's a uniquely bad time to try to resolve this controversy decisively. But it's also hard to ignore the fact that much of what Lion is doing was pioneered in WinAPI.
(I'm an OS X user; also, I do systems software security).
Whether Windows (Vista+) is safer than Linux is up for debate. But safety and security are different concepts.
I did anti-terrorism in the military for awhile and I totally agree, but I would love to read the great tptacek's breakdown of the differences.
Imagine how much trouble could have been avoided if MS had used that model in the first place...!
The only problem is people refusing to upgrade from a decade old OS.
Also, we have several applications which, while they will run on Windows 7, they simply do not run well. From a business standpoint, it's really hard to justify an upgrade that results in reduced functionality in the name of security. I can clean up after malware pretty quickly - people working with outdated but business-critical applications lose hours of their days when software starts acting up because it wasn't written with a good security model in mind and it's being forced into that environment.
You can say Windows 7 solved the problem all you want, but there remain countless areas where Windows XP is required, and virtualization is not a magic bullet - networking is always tricky. And in any case, we do all that work of migration and what do we gain? Exactly what we have right now, except with hardware accelerated graphics that don't support all our hardware and some difficult to quantify reduction in malware attacks.
I'm not one of them, but I see them every day. Windows 7 does not solve the Windows XP problem. (The Windows XP problem will be solved when any given computer can run Windows 7 easily.)
The Android NDK is reliant on this - any application in Android can perform your arbitrary code execution, and it seems to be working out alright.
The Android thing works because you aren't just running arbitrary code, you are probably running code that you got from the Android Marketplace, which was probably screened to make sure it doesn't do something bad.
Also if you use sudo or su in X, they now have root thanks to the keylogger.
Security is hard.
From Windows 95 I was hooked on GUI's. I didn't like Microsoft but I liked Windows. I'd almost never care enough about Microsoft to say anything but when it came to Windows I always had an opinion I'd want to air and it was always in the spirit of wanting an improved product. Mac OS 9 felt like a joke and the various Linux distributions felt unfinished.
But eventually I changed to OS X when one of it's later "kitties" came out. Among my friends who have a Mac I'm pretty much the first to ever criticize Apple products but if you look at how much money I spend on the platform and how much time I invest learning about it you wouldn't think I was a critic. I don't have opinions about Windows beside wishing IE wasn't such a pain to design for.
Being critical does not equal being against something. When your critics no longer want to share their opinion of your product or service, that's when you should be truly scared. That is when you're in a really, really bad place.
Preston OTOH regularly writes critical MS articles, more often than he writes those that defend MS.
The author who refered to Preston as the equivalent of an MS PR firm doesn't know his history well.
My comment is merely meant as an insignificant resistance towards the uprising of the misunderstood reflector and doubter. Far too often are people promoting division with it's constant "us"-and-"them"-rhetoric and "Either you're with us or against us"-policy. It's healthy to doubt and question.
It's exactly how hacktivists such as Anonymous are alienated and how projects such as WikiLeaks is attempted to be criminalized. Whistleblowers are not the enemy nor the ones threatening the safety of the people.