An unknown target is harder to crack than a known one.
The people cracking or revealing the expoits and security flaws are not doing it from scratch. They've got a tool box full of hacks, crawlers and worms that know how to do it.

The chinese probably cracked the XP flaws [on christmas eve] not so much for bragging rights but to assure their system security.

If a system has flaws would it not be better to know?

The Chinese are supposed to be developing an "Asian" OS. Maybe M$ is paying back the government for DOJ's dropping of it's case and intentionally providing holes so that our spies can look into their (or our) architecture.

If Chinese engineers can hack the flaws without MS source code - why can't M$ do it before they ship. Reason: The flaws are intentional - or - M$ does not have the brain power to stay on top of it.

MS should have found those guys before the chinese and before the SP was released. My vote - it's intentional - and M$ is simply paying off the DOJ for dropping the monopoly case.

The new EULA forbids us from using VFP 7 and higher on a WINE/UNIX operating system. You know - if M$ had been broken up into a seperate OS and SW companies, we'd be using VFP on Linux - maybe even without wine.

And - everybody thats griping that the Chinese should have discretely informed M$ are propably guys that told their bosses M$ was secure. A lot of decisions were being and are being made regarding UNIX and Windows. Linux is growing - MS - with the exception of a few CE-like environments is flat - IE is being 86ed (because of security flaws) in favor of other browsers.

The flaws are intentional - either for homeland security invasion of privacy or commercial reasons. Microsoft has forgotten who her customers are.

RANT OFF:)