A spokesperson for Microsoft Thursday evening characterized as "grossly inaccurate" reports from earlier in the day, including from Reuters, stating that a technical glitch in the company"s Live Meeting services led to a dissolution of a meeting between Microsoft and security products vendors.
These stories were wrong, said the spokesperson, on three major counts: 1) the exclusivity and number of vendors attending the meeting (20 security vendors participated in this one meeting, possibly including Symantec and McAfee, though this was one of several such meetings); 2) the subject of the meeting (it did not involve a possible revelation or licensing of PatchGuard code or methods); 3) the damage caused by the technical glitch (it only delayed the meeting for 15 minutes, after which, representatives from all 20 companies remained on the call).
The actual subject of this afternoon"s Internet conference, the spokesperson told BetaNews, is Microsoft"s intention to invite nearly 150 security products vendors to join it in the development of an open security services API for Windows. Such an API would not open up PatchGuard, the kernel protection system the company currently plans for Windows Vista, the spokesperson pointed out emphatically several times during our discussion, nor does Microsoft have any plans to ever open up PatchGuard.