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Microsoft makes Messenger changes

John McCormick Tech Republic

Published: 10 Nov 2003 11:55 GMT

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has announced that the company will improve security by turning on the firewall in Windows XP by default and making changes to or even disabling Windows Messenger. The updated security changes will begin with the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, which will reportedly disable Windows Messenger and will also include changes to the API for remote procedure calls that will limit access to the local system. This change will make it easier for developers to apply better security to the data that move to and from applications.

Windows Messenger is such a security threat and a popular new target for spammers that AOL recently took the major step of disabling Windows Messenger on subscribers' machines. Unfortunately for some, the AOL software doesn't ask permission to alter the machines or get subscribers’ consent, according to this report in PC World. But that’s another story.

Microsoft updates security bulletins
In addition, Microsoft has released some major updates to the recent slew of seven bulletins that were all announced on a single day. This follows an earlier upgrade to the MS03-041 bulletin, which doesn’t appear to be very important.

MS03-042 and MS03-043 have been updated twice each, once to fix the original patch. The new patch versions are intended to fix the debug programs issues reported in Knowledge Base Article 830846. MS03-045 has already been revised three times, once to fix the patch. The bugs in the original patches did not compromise the security of the patch but did create some problems with the software.