TCP/MS, We'll Cure What Ails You

Cringely can string some words together from time to time, and this week's installment is a pretty good one. He's been reading a little too much Gibson (raw sockets have nothing to do with the spread of MSTD ^[?] 's), but overall, he's probably right. When the time is ripe, I think we'll see a move exactly like this.

Comments

Re:Already been done...

[sigwinch]

This whole article is a red herring, and Cringley's about a technically literate as a door knob.

I've stayed in hotels that have a computer in each door knob. I think you're overestimating Cringley's skills.

Re:Gibson wrote zone alarm?

[jeremy f]

Gibson constantly plugs Zone Alarm, so it's not suprising that people who don't read carefully would think that Zone Alarm is a GRC product, not a Zone Labs product.

If Gibson wrote Zone Alarm, it'd look as ugly as hell, have lots of BIG and alternating fonts, but be less than 300k in size, written in ASM, and fast as hell.

Re:How DID they do that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep going back to Microsoft because he's kind and gentle and loving. He cuddles after sex and he's always complimenting my figure. He's never attacked me. Ever. Not like that last jerk I dated. Linux was a bastard and he beat me nightly. Me and Microsoft were just good friends at the time and he was dependable. Linux never quite liked Microsoft. He was always saying, 'D00d, dat Micro$oft sux0rs. Free software rules! He ain't nothing but a buggy BSOD-loving freak.' I couldn't stand him and his arrogance. Thankfully, we broke up. Microsoft and I got together and things were good. Occasionally we get together with BeOS for a threesome. She's a real nice number and she's able to do everything for me Microsoft couldn't.

I'm happy now.

Re:Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the days when hackers were hackers and viruses could be transferred by mounting a floppy disk. Those were the days.

Gimme a cookie!

Must be some good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I want some of whatever Cringely is smoking. He seems to having some really wild hallucinations.

Re:Gibson wrote zone alarm?

[Safety Cap]

Gibson constantly plugs Zone Alarm

Seeing as how Zone Alarm is the only darn free/software firewall that appears to work, then why run anything else? I'd like to see Microsoft's crack team of security "experts" come up with something comparable.

Oh wait, they did.

Hahahahah

Re:How DID they do that?

[drdink]

Yes. Thankfully I don't fall for that propaganda either and I use FreeBSD.

*waits for the moderators to notice the word FreeBSD and start sucking away the karma*

Re:Outlook already does part of what he suggests

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I don't know what else people expect Microsoft to do.

For me It's not even about what Microsoft should do in the future. I just don't trust anyone stupid enough -- anyone lacking enough real world experience to know that executing foreign scripts is a gaping security hole comparable to my good friend Mr Goatse.

I won't trust any future software from them, at least for another five years.

Of course it's a no-win situation. They're the stupid hooker who's spreading AIDs and now no one trusts them... cry me a fucking river. There are plenty of other fish in the sea and Microsoft have thoroughly proved their stupidity.

I'll shop elsewhere, keh?

Re:Raw Sockets == IP packet spoofing

[mimbleton]

So is 99% of personal Linux installations.
What's your point ?

what's up michael?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this article got not very warm welcome from technical slashdot crowd. And yet according to Michael "this week's installment is a pretty good one". Care for explanation? First two paragraphs of Cringely are fairly reasonable and MS bashing...
As a side effect of this explanation we discover how much /. editors read an article before publishing...

Gibson wrote zone alarm?

[Safety Cap]

By default, under this scenario, your PC becomes a TCP/IP read-only device. By running applications like Gibson's Zone Alarm you can -- right now -- severely limit the use of TCP/IP by applications on your PC

I didn't know Steve Gibson wrote Zone Alarm. When did this happen? What happened to Zone Labs?!

Not necessarily

[marm]

If these attacks used spoofed IP packets, there would be no easy defense.

Except for if every damn net admin would WAKE UP and SMELL THE COFFEE and IMPLEMENT EGRESS FILTERING or SOURCE ROUTE VERIFICATION or whatever your router calls it.

If you have a router built within the last 5 years, I can pretty much guarantee you it supports it. So turn it on already!

If every border router on the internet used it, we could stamp out IP address spoofing overnight. No magic about it. All the border router has to do is check that the source address of the packet is within the range of addresses that it 'owns'. If it isn't, drop it, and log the MAC address so that it can be traced.

Easy huh? Any router worth its salt can do it, so...

Please!?!? What does it take to convince you?

Re:How DID they do that?

[Swaffs]

Ironic that you should refer to Apple users as the "lunatic fringe" when just the other day I saw a commercial for WindowsXP with the song Lunatic Fringe by Red Rider playing in the background while this guy at a desk is blasting across the salt flats a la recent Maxima commercials (which I love to watch).