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:Oh god, not another.

[Agent Green]

Raw sockets, like Code Red, have been blown entirely out of proportion. In fact, the problem lies with those "unprivledged" users without any knowledge that open up attachments from nearly anyone.

Personally, I turn off the "hide known file extensions." I wonder how many people open up those .vbs email attachments becasue they don't see that it is a .vbs attachment.

This isn't the first, or the last security hype that we'll see. As far as I'm concerned, it all started with the Michaelangelo virus that went around about 10 years or so ago. The world didn't end then...and it's not going to end now.

Re:How DID they do that?

[Detritus]

Backslash instead of slash in paths... / for options instead of - (remember switchchar? ..someone took it out) CR/LF instead of NL. ^Z as EOF. blah, blah. I wonder how many of these are deliberate?

Most of those things were inherited from CP/M, a popular operating system for 8080 and Z-80 microprocessors. MS-DOS was originally an 8086 clone of CP/M.