The trouble with XP SP2

I’ve been reading a few posts about how bad XP SP2 is – “it breaks applications” – and how companies like IBM (and my own) and placing a hold on deploying SP2.

The company bit I understand – as will every other person who has worked for a medium-to-large company – as there are serious logistics involved in deploying patches like this in a sensible fashion.

As for the people complaining about it breaking applications – do they not understand that the basic principle of a firewall is to block traffic, and a good firewall should block by default? I mean, it’s not exactly hard to unblock the ports you require is it? Even Microsoft’s own knowledge base article about it basically just tells you to unblock the ports…

/me shakes head…

Jonathan Hassell gets it right in his O’Reilly blog – this sums his post up nicely:

SP2 does break software, but it breaks software that was doing security wrong.

Couldn’t agree more…