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WindowsUpdate.com Secured, Permanently
Precisely nineteen months ago, Bill Gates sent out a
memo
to employees (and the press) announcing that security was Microsoft's
number-one priority.
Today, about a hundred readers have submitted the
news that Microsoft.com
went down last night.
And now, the company has
"extinguished" WindowsUpdate.com
(future updates will come from a
different domain).
All this because of some Microsoft worm that triggers at midnight. Related news:
Windows Update
says you're protected, but maybe you're not;
WU.com
briefly ran Linux, heh;
worm variant with clever "anatomical term."
Don't worry next week there will be another memo with the URL for the new update
It seems the power in one of the most populated areas of North America was out around the same time Micrsoft was making these fixes? Coincidence? I think not. For those of you in the power outage area, expect it to happen again tomorrow as the DoS is about to begin.
Microsoft should take a clue from User Friendly!
We (a 30,000 student Midwest University) are currently thinking about making our DNS servers authoritive for windowsupdate.com and and pointing the A record bac k to loopback.
Did they point windowsupdate.com to 127.0.0.1 ? I hope not, there was a mail on FD explaining that such an action would cause it to DOS the local network.. Also, wtf is up with the site running lunix?
...all HTTP requests to WindowsUpdate.com will be directed to goatse.cx.
Some speculate that this will considerably improve Microsoft's customer service.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
[rimshot]
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week!
Breathing is more important to us than any other activity. If we don't breathe, we will die.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
1) Disconnect box from all external cords
2) Encase box in several hundred cubic meters of concrete
3) Surround concrete with meter thick lead lining
4) Bury under radioactive waste in a geologically stable region
5) Saturate the surface with nuclear land mines
6) Curse MicrSoft, becase you still get hacked!
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
that gotta teach a lesson to those lousy worm writters. Changing domain name, who whold have thunk , microsoft would come up with such an ingeneous solution.
Take that you microsoft hackers, bet you are scratching your head now.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Oh, you mean this?
Precisely nineteen months ago, Bill Gates sent out a memo to employees (and the press) announcing that security was Microsoft's number-one priority.
It's the first line of the fucking story! For cryin' out loud, we know you're not going to read the fucking article, we don't really expect you to even read the whole story, but can't you at least fucking read the first line?!?!
Last night I finally went to go upgrade from Windows Media Player 6.4 to 9.0 so I can test out those high definition WMP9 videos for once. I couldn't figure out why microsoft.com wasn't loading but now I find out it was because of a DOS attack.
Now I'm thinking, was this intervention from a higher force to protect me from installing WMP9 or just odd luck?
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
You have to give it to the guy; his timing is impeccable...
Funny, it looks to me like Microsoft's security is #2... ;)
At least we know where the DDOS attack didn't come from: New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, et al.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
A question ..
Assuming that all old windows systems are unsecure or badly written..
Would it not make sense to take 75% fo $45 billion and offere to replace hardware and update to winXp or longhorn to every MS custoemr worldwide?
It would be the PR stunt of the century..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
That is the coolest job title. I'd have to negotiate a gold plated machette as a hiring bonus for a title like that. And anyone working for me would be officially titled a Hacking Minion!
NT
Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available.
Maybe he didn't get the memo?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
M$FT doesn't have time to fix bugs. These problems are an annoyance and only after they have been taken to task time and time and time again - they have finally decided to do something about it. They have been rushing software out the door for so long that they don't know how to perform genuine quality control. M$FT is not a software company that makes money so much as it is a company that makes money by making software. Well, buying up other's software slapping on some lip stick and then putting it out as their own.
Bill Gates: "Leave us alone so we can innovate"
User: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I don't know, PISS POOR seems to describe it pretty well - and that would be #1 - unless you were going for shitty, which it is and is, therefore, indeed #2. :->
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
From the memo:
"Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available"
Well, at least some people don't have to worry about electricity...
-eric
From: Bill Gates
To: Microsoft staff
Last month I sent out a memo. Well here is another one. It has come to my attention that people on the website www.slashdot.org make fun of me and how I run my business.
On another note there is another Windows Update available at the url www.windowsupdate2.com please download this due to the fact there were major holes in the last update.
-Bill
"Microsoft.com went down last night" - See? Microsoft really DOES suck!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
You're new here, aren't you?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
If those rumors are true, then the worm didn't cause the power failures, it just disabled the systems that would have prevented them. That this happened at around the same time is just a coincidence, - or maybe minor power failures happen frequently and were just prevented from spreading?
Who the fuck runs mission-critical systems on Windows?!! HOMER SIMPSON?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The sorry fact is that Micrsoft's complete Internet infrastructure would immediately break down without Unix/Linux.
Remember when microsoft was offline for half a week? They migrated their DNS-servers from Windows to Akamai(Linux)
Now they migrated the whole load-balancing and caching system.
The only thing left is their measly webserver-box, so it seems.
Will someone please patent something like this before micro$oft:
;-)
"Method to prevent worm attacks by changing site hosting locations as many times as needed".
This way they'll either have to fix the damn holes or pay up.
I'm joking... but if someone wants to try and the USPO actually accepts it (not totally unlikely) just give me some credit, and some 10% of the profits will do.
/* TAANSTAFL */
Reminds me of the old military joke,
The Army will post guards around the place.
The Navy will turn out the lights and lock the doors.
The Marines will kill everybody inside and set up a headquarters
The Air Force will take out a 5 year lease with an option to buy.
[
While Windows was getting all the attention from their common creator Microsoft, DOS has secretly been waiting for its opportunity to strike at both.
From the infoworld article:
The company is cooperating with federal law enforcement officials to investigate the attack, which is the second successful DOS attack against Microsoft.com this month.
Two successful DOS attacks this month. And what a sense of irony: revolt against the creator by manipulating "the favorite" to do its bidding.
What's so hard about using a lower-case 'o'?
This is not my sig.
Man, that's gotta be embarassing -- their ass is being saved by the OS they are trying to kill. Good thing they paid SCO for that Linux license.
Not a huge deal, since the official URL is windowsupdate.microsoft.com . The start menu, Tools in IE, and Windows Help all have that address. The worm author was kinda stupid, he should have pointed it to microsoft.com or windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
darn...
cvs co msworm.asm
click. tap. clack. click.
cvs commit -m 'fix url'
make;make install
ok, done. Thanks!
The impending DDoS attack on Microsoft scheduled in the MSBlast worm was drastically mitigated by Microsoft's DNS shuffing, the diligent patching by systems administrators around the world, and the lack of electricity in several population centers. However, it was replaced by a much more potent DDoS attack by people checking to see if Microsoft's site was dead yet...
"Never put off for tomorrow what can be avoided altogether"
With Microsoft getting DOS attacks and viruses all the time one might begin to think that someone doesn't like them. Hrmm. Wonder who that could be..
However, even more important than any of these new capabilities is the fact that it is designed from the ground up to deliver Trustworthy Computing. What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.
Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available. "
I guess Bill hasn't seen the news in the last 24-48 hours. I haven't seen a virus yet that can take down all systems in less than nine seconds. If the reliability of power is what Bill aims to achieve we (MS) admins will always have a paycheck...
I dunno. I just saw someone else's signature line say it's a guaranteed +5 Funny, so I figured I'd do a one-shot experiment to see for myself. 'Course, it only got to +3, so I guess the guy wasn't right after all. :)
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.