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The Significance of the Hotmail Crack

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-read dept.

Slothrup writes "Telepolis has an interesting piece linking the problems at Hotmail with the Sun purchase of Star Division. An excerpt: 'What this the Hotmail hack shows is that the Internet's self-regulation doesn't work anymore because it relies on the assumption of more or less equal participants. This is clearly no longer the case.' " Interesting piece. Definitely worth a read.

1 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong, wrong, wrong. by mnot · · Score: 4
    ...With[sic] sounds almost like mainframes all over!

    You're not rebuking the idea of centralised computing, you're playing on people's prejudices against 20-year old dumb terminals that were hard to use.

    In huge centralized system the effects of such attacks are greatly magnified because one single line of code can suddenly open millions of mailboxes.

    And one line of bad code can't be much more of a risk on millions of PCs running the same (browser, e-mail, etc)? At least on a centralised server, it can be fixed for good, by qualified people.

    You invariably end up with no rights what so ever, and you are likely not even to know it because you would have to be a computer scientist and a lawyer at the same time.

    What exactly does this have to do with the matter at hand? How will putting a PC that needs to be configured, maintained and supported on every desktop help here?

    Centrally managed computing (like Sun may offer) is a good answer for companies that need to manage hundreds or thousands of desktops for clueless users in a sane manner. Noone is shoving anything down your throat. Yes, believe it or not, the big, nasty corporations aren't, in this case, trying to rob you blind, curtail your precious rights, or anything else. They just don't care.

    The key different between HotMail and StarOffice (as a service) is that StarOffice will run INSIDE the company, and therefore be the responsibility of "friendlies", NOT an external service provider.

    Of course, they'll probably make it a net-available services as well, but so what? Big corporations *gasp* are still responsible for writing a lot of the software out there.

    I don't know exactly what the author is trying to do here; it seems like they've strung together a list of 'hot-button' issues to make some kind of statement, one that we've heard many times before. It doesn't add anything really useful.