Microsoft will more quickly retire old code in its Windows operating system and other software as a result of the company's four-month-old "trustworthy computing" initiative, the company's lead bug basher said in an interview.
The revelation follows last week's warning that a serious vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer occurred in the software supporting a decade-old protocol that has rarely been used since the World Wide Web became popular.
"A lot of the (coming) design changes are to remove this feature or turn that one off by default," said Steve Lipner, director of security assurance for Microsoft and the man on the ground for the company's trustworthy computing initiative.
He added that when Microsoft is faced with a choice between removing old, possibly insecure code and keeping a feature to please a small fraction of customers, increasingly security is winning out. "Do we think that things will be retired more quickly? Sure," Lipner said.
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