Slashdot Mirror

Considering how often Slashdot goes down

Can you be more specific? How often does slashdot go down? Now you're just making stuff up.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /slashdot.org

Wikimedia Foundation also runs on a small cluster of MySQL servers that are nothing more than dual opterons, and that runs Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, etc. etc. etc.- all languages, worldwide. They average about a thousand web requests per second (roughly 25% of that traffic hits the MySQL servers).

Isn't this form of ads pretty much dead?

Netcraft confirms it, pay per click is NOT dead.

From the page: "Domain Pay-Per-Click Services Growing Rapidly"

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.fuddr uckers.com
Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
on 216.183.122.74

They have had their DNS hijacked. Netcraft's OS, webserver and hosting history page has the story... changed just today. (After the /. story hit??)

If you want to make a point, then use evidence that matters. Job listings do not indicate what is in production except on the system needing attention at the organization needing the employee. Perhaps something relevent from http://www.netcraft.com/ or http://www.alexa.com/.



I read those sites, and I learned that BSD is dying. I don't know what to do with that information right now.

LAMP handles a lot less of those sites than you might think. Check up on job adverts for Google, Amazon etc. and you will find a strong demand for Java and C++ as well as LAMP.

This makes absolutely no sense:

Assertion:There aren't that many huge-ass LAMP sites on the internet.
Evidence:See job adverts for Google and Amazon.

It's kind of like:

We have a low murder rate in Detroit because the department of corrections isn't hiring executioners right now.

If you want to make a point, then use evidence that matters. Job listings do not indicate what is in production except on the system needing attention at the organization needing the employee. Perhaps something relevent from http://www.netcraft.com/ or http://www.alexa.com/.

Interestingly, NetCraft it showing some recent activity on that domain - http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=iphone.or g.

Netcraft confirms it.

Mods: -1: old and painfully overused joke

if some linux desktop flavor were as widely popular as windows, do you honestly think it would be any different with a new wonder worm every year?

Yes

you linux zealots are honestly going to tell me that some badly written linux app that people widely adapt isn't going to be fodder for these guys as well if the application and the os had as much exposure as windows?

As far as I'm aware, there is no popular software for Linux which is as poorly developed as Microsoft's software. Additionally, open source operating systems employ a variety of methods to boost security, most of which are enforced by their kernels.

if linux were up at bat instead of microsoft in the popularity contest, linux would be striking out just as much as microsoft.

According to Netcraft, Microsoft have only 20.43% of the Web server market share as of August 2005. Can you recall there recently being any worm capable of compromising the dominant non-Windows servers?

does the linux world have a similar muscular attack response system?

1. I wouldn't call Microsoft's response to the worms exploiting the MS05-039 bug "muscular". Judging from the eWeek article, it seemed desperate and entirely improvised. I think Microsoft's actions reveal their awareness of the embarrassing fact that their software is primarily developed for, and used by the under-trained and inexperienced.
2. Patches for security vulnerabilities discovered in open source software are generally created and released much faster than Microsoft.
3. Open source communities properly educate their users about computer security, which helps prevent computers administrated by such users from being compromised.
4. Open source software has sensible default settings, which helps prevent the host computer from being compromised.

additionally, what happens is that over time, because of it's exposure, microsoft actually gets pretty darn well patched from all of the really scary expoits out there

Unfortunately, Microsoft's software designers and engineers just create more vulnerabilities due to their world-famous stupidity.

I was reading a dated (2004) article comparing security on Windows and Linux. In it, they point out that Windows is not on the Top-50 list of highest uptimes. I recently visited the list (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html) and noticed that Windows does indeed have a few entries.
But, no Windows machine should have an uptime of more than ~6 months as all MS updates require a reboot. And the Netcraft list contained Win2k machines w/ 4+ yrs uptime! That means they should be ripe for the picking, right?
Directly-accessible web servers that haven't been patched.
Any reason these aren't hit?

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

If you want to see what Google's planning, visit here.

Found this : http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /talk.google.com

Linux Apache/1.3.29 Unix mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.3.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.7a

If you're searching for a hosting provider, Netcraft has a rather nice table that displays server uptimes, % failed requests & other ancillary information for a large sample of hosting companies. An example of one row in the aforementioned table would be as follows:

Hosting provider = www.valueweb.net
OS = Linux
Outage hh:mm:ss = 0:00:00
Failed Req% = 0.00
DNS (Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname) = 0.181
Connect (first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server) = 0.105
First byte (time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received) = 0.211
Total (This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received) = 0.211
Kb/s = -
Size (K) = 0

The table displays the top 50 hosting providers with respect to failed requests, so, personally, I restricted my search to all the hosting providers that had a Linux OS (for script compatibility), and a failed request percentage below 3.0%. Given these performance constraints, I subsequently chose the cheapest suitable plan offered by a hosting company in this sample set, based on my bandwidth/disk space criteria.

Does she realize that her story is served up on Linux boxen http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.newsfactor.com

BehaveDave

Fox network runs on Linux
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.foxnews.com

Unless you're Apache.

so does amazon and many other huge names. But lets not get carried away: Your busines can use Linux, and it probably won't become the next google or amazon. Linux is just a small part of the equation that made google a success. And hey! ebay uses windows, WTF? do your own research at http://www.netcraft.com/

FreeBSD is quite easy to administer. A great thing about FreeBSD is rc.conf. One configuration file which will manage a ton of services. Not 6 init levels to manage (although chkconfig does this well). I had great luck with vinum for software raid support. We had six disks spiining in one file server and when one went down vinum made it easy to recover.

I would not like to see FreeBSD turn into a GNU/Linux type of experience. They both have their strengths and nicities. There are time when you need GNU/Linux and time you want something else. FreeBSD is a great alternative.

And well, there is that uptime holy war ... (don't mean to troll) but check this out: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html BSD have the top 20+ in uptime. What does this prove? Well that they are easy to manage. Put the box up and forget about it. No 100 reboots and services are available.

Frankly, SCO is doomed, no matter what they do. They can't compete with Linux, or Windows, or even Solaris (since the x86 version will survive because of OpenSolaris). I imagine that all the developers of those apps are working at porting their software to one of those three platforms, or already have a port of their software. Either Windows because it's popular and widespread, or Linux because it's easy and cheap. Some may target Solaris, but because Solaris doesn't appear to be well suited for low end machines (and that's what nearly all SCO UNIX machines are), I doubt many are.

Looks like *he's* the customer he's trying to convince.

You should just gain some knowledge. Most likely, these hosting companies are running server farms.

Easy boy! ;-) Of course they are running server farms. Of course that goes for the linux/BSD/Solaris sites as well as the MS sites. What is the point? The NetCraft statistics have LOTS of variables and certainly cannot be used to say one is better than the other! There are just too many other variables to use them to draw such a conclusion. They can however be used to get a very general view of reliablity in the wild. I'm just trying to point out that Windows isn't what it used to be (when you would rarely see see a windows site in the top ten let alone being the most used OS in the top ten). Anyway, here is the current version.

Well, I wasn't able to find hosting reliability stats from Netcraft but certainly good uptime is a requirement for reliability. The uptime stats I found show IIS in 6 out of the top 50 with the highest ranking at 16th. Could you give me a link to your stats? While in my experience what I've said is correct, I'd like to know if I'm actually wrong in the larger picture.

I guess maybe I'm more frustrated by the fact that you so often have to reboot Windows machines (a process that can take several minutes) if anything goes wrong. If it actually is the application's fault, you could kill and restart Apache in a few seconds.

To be honest, the biggest problem we have is from a third party app that we are thankfully moving away from. Still, there are plenty of others that were written in house that fail. One is just a registration form that checks user input for typos or just plain old duplicate registrations. What's so complicated about an approximate string matching algorithm that it would cause a lockup requiring a system reboot?

You should just gain some knowledge. Most likely, these hosting companies are running server farms. I can only find the july results that it goes like

Windows - 3
Linux - 3
FreeBSD - 3
Solaris - 1

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/index.ht ml

It doesn't matter what you're running, it's how you keep it running... and Microsoft has the market on their side.

Interesting... If Apache is just SO hard to keep running that it takes at least one Linux C programmer on site to hold the thing together (although I really don't see what Linux or C have to do with web programming) and Microsoft is so easy that all you need is a pretty 1-800 number to make it all work, would you care to explain to me why Apache is running on ~70% of Internet servers while Microsoft's IIS is running on ~20%? Yes, it's true that you'll need someone who knows how to use and configure Apache, but how is that any different than needing someone who knows how to use and configure IIS? If you have to call some hotline to solve your problem, you're going to have to sit through a pleasant game of phone tag before you ever "get in touch with programmers" who will be unable to solve any issue with IIS (short of saying they'll build and release a patch sometime next month). If it's your website design team you're contacting... well that's entirely unrelated to the web server in the first place.

The fact is, in my experience, having a phone number to call is not all that helpful; what I can learn through that can be learned in half the time through the Internet. The only thing it's good for is making management happy but, IMHO, they should not be involved in the IT decision process to begin with (except perhaps for defining a budget limit).

Well, in any case I'm glad to know that millions of Linux C programmers are employed thanks to the use of this inferior F/OSS.

Uptime Summary for www.tommy.com

Max. uptime in days
Windows Server 2003: 12.18
Linux: 267.25
Solaris: 493.80

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.tommyhilfiger.com

Am I on the wrong listing or has their MAIN site been hosted? And hosted on Solaris.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.tommy.com

Seems that they JUST switched over to Windows and that they had JUST switched to Linux.

Come on. They've been on Linux for SIX MONTHS and they've spent THREE YEARS on Apache and Solaris.

Great. They've been on Win2003 for the past .... let's see, ELEVEN DAYS!!!!

Talk about rushing a story.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.tommyhilfiger.com

Am I on the wrong listing or has their MAIN site been hosted? And hosted on Solaris.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.tommy.com

Seems that they JUST switched over to Windows and that they had JUST switched to Linux.

Come on. They've been on Linux for SIX MONTHS and they've spent THREE YEARS on Apache and Solaris.

Great. They've been on Win2003 for the past .... let's see, ELEVEN DAYS!!!!

Talk about rushing a story.

Funny, looks like they've been running Windows2003 since the year it was made - they already had a foot in that door. Note also the conspicuous presence of Solaris.

All that aside I think this is fantastic news. There are many things worse than growing pains, like for instance that GNU/Linux is in any way associated with such a pack of utter and complete tossers. You can keep your "All American" cologne, it reeks.

Well it is specially good at hosting Linux bashing articles:

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /cooltechzone.com

ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc. 1333 North Stemmons Freeway Suite 110 Dallas TX US 75207 69.93.78.219 Linux Apache/1.3.33 Unix mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.3.10 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a

"Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!"

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.cooltechzone.com

Seems it's good enough to serve TFA...

The question is why do they? I love Microsoft. Absolutely adore it and what's more, I hate Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!

Anyone else find it funny cooltechzone is run on apache and linux?

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.cooltechzone.com

Here is more info on that. It looks like they are running Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.

I was cerious to see if they ended up using their own software or is this going to be like hotmail where in the background they are using qmail. http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /start.com

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

but innovative stuff like the anti-phishing work and low-rights IE.

Using any other browser would be running all that browser code without admin privs. Yeah, they're making a "broker" that handles all the system interface. Pretty much the architecture most unix-based server programs have been using for years. Except at the client/browser level it's unnecessary... unless you're building on previous poor design decisions.

The anti-phishing... yet another thing others have already been doing quite well for quite a while.

It's plainly obvious they're playing catch-up on many fronts. That alone isn't a reason to bash them, as least as far as I'm concerned. But calling "innovative" the features that have been implemented for over a year or more in other browsers or as third party add-ons is pretty cheap.

Or did I miss some new features, anything really, that's truely innovative in IE7, rather than just implementing features already available from competitors and third parties?

July 29, Netcraft (UK) -- Phishers steal trust from eBay sign in pages. Scammers have exploited a flaw in the eBay Website that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. Registered users of eBay's popular online auction Website must sign in using a username and password in order to participate in bidding and listing of items. A new style of phishing attack shows scammers exploiting flaws on the Sign In page and on another ancilliary page which results in victims being redirected to the scammer's phishing site after they have logged in. This particular attack starts off like many others, by sending thousands of emails that instruct victims to update their eBay account details by visiting a URL. However, that is where the similarity ends, because the URL in this case actually takes the victim to the genuine eBay Sign In page, hosted on signin.ebay.com. By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the scammer has changed the behavior of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the scammer's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com. Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/29/phish ers_steal_ trust_from_ebay_sign_in_pages.html

Phishers Steal Trust From Ebay Sign In Pages

"Fraudsters have exploited a flaw in the eBay web site that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. ... By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the fraudster has changed the behaviour of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the fraudster's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com."

Because of the "borrowing" of ebay's web site, the EBay toolbar reports the phishing site as legit.

Really? ASP on Redhat Linux running Apache??
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.disney.com

Also try checking out Zend.com's website to sell who is running enterprise level PHP installations.

You'd be amazed to know how wrong you are.

It's not exactly altruism .

"and Linux is declared a "Copyright circumvention device" by His Majesty George W. Bush"

Kinda hard for that to happen, especially if the White House website is hosted on Linux.

-eventhorizon

Do you see /. or any other massively popular site running M$ web services? No. They run Apache with PHP (or in Slashdot's case, Perl) to generate pages and handle a huge load while maintaining security. The only massively popular site I can think of offhand that runs M$ web services is MySpace.com. And that suffers from overloading and random crashes.
Apache is approaching 70% market share as measured by a survey of active and available Web servers from Netcraft. IIS and .NET are a joke.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

My question: What is "BSD/OS" supposed to be? The old BSDi?

Oh, MSFT is a monopoly; there is no question about that. In economics, a monopoly in a given market -- let's say desktop operating systems -- is generally defined as existing when a single producer (MSFT) controls 75% or more of the market.

Last I checked, MSFT had Windows on somewhere around 92% of desktop machines. That clearly makes MSFT a monopoly provider in the desktop OS market.

Server OSs are a different story. Where webservers are concerned, it is official; Netcraft confirms: Apache controls nearly three times the amount of marketshare that MSFT does. Apache, in fact, almost qualifies as a monopoly provider in the webserver market...

Of course, being a monopoly is not illegal (see the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1893). But *abusing* one's monopoly position is, and that's where MSFT got in trouble and were, in fact, convicted in court for so doing if you recall...

(I am typing this on a WinXP machine. But I have run Gentoo on it as well, and run FreeBSD elsewhere.)

No wonder linux doesn't appear in that list,

if you looked at this page on netcraft's site...
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html
You would see the following information...

Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days.

I dunno about what's "most suited to big iron", but I do know that 45 of Netcraft's top 50 uptime list run some type of BSD (as of the authoring of this post):

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

Regardless of applicability to the topic at hand, that's a pretty impressive statistic.

(Apologies for not citing more than one statistic in a post like this. I know it's pretty much useless as-is.)

..but I'm glad that the machines my bank uses to hande their online banking site are #6, #7 and #8 on this list.

I don't really remember, that there would have ever been any unavailablilities due to them. (But due to my ISP? Yes.)

* OpenBSD is focused 100% on security. They very tightly audit their code and control what goes in the distribution. In theory it shares code with FreeBSD, but in practice it lags behind (ie: last I knew it doesn't even have multiprocessor support because of security complications).

* NetBSD is designed with portability in mind. It runs on 17 different CPU families and over 60 different machine architectures. I've a feeling that the embedded systems folks love this OS. Because of the multiplatform focus it does lag somewhat in single-platform features.

* FreeBSD is the "mainstream" BSD distribution. It supports a range of modern x86-32 and x86-64 hardware with multiprocessor support (and has ports to some other supported CPUs where things like multiprocessor may not work), and enjoys features like a Linux compatibility layer (so you can run Linux x86 binaries, including 3D accelerated games like Unreal Tournament 2004). For it's users, the FreeBSD Ports Tree is the greatest software repository and distribution method in the know universe (eg: "cd /usr/ports/somesoftware" make; make install; make clean" to download source code, apply any BSD-specific patches, compile and install the binaries). FreeBSD is also used by some large companies for webhosting due to it's mixture of security and performance. For example, Yahoo has always been hosted on FreeBSD, and they're only the #1 and #4 most visited website on the internet (source).

* OSX is Apple's custom version of FreeBSD that only runs on Macs. The focus here is a friendly, hugable user interface slapped over the Unixy FreeBSD core. The concept is a bit like Microsoft Bob but without making you want to kill yourself quite so badly, the implementation is not terrible. I would say more, but I'm tired of people saying how "great" OSX is then pointing to the shiny UI. A shiny UI does not a great OS make, although it certainly is no worse or better than Windows XP when it comes to running applications (provided applications are available for it).

If you're not sure which one to try, install FreeBSD with the Gnome desktop. It has the potential to be an interesting afternoon's learning experience and there is a lot of documentation to guide you if something goes wrong. Get FreeBSD from the official site or via BitTorrent (and always check the MD5's from the official site after downloading).

I really like FreeBSD - however, I'm now officially tired of messing with my computer for the sake of messing with my computer. Linux and FreeBSD have both worn out their welcome in favor of Windows XP with it's autoupdate feature. Hey, Windows XP runs Firefox AND all my games.