In further news, I'd like to announce that I am patenting the "ON/OFF" switch, a convenient device that enables safe, secure, and easy-to-use initiation and termination of electric current through a device. pThat's the ultimate M$ internet security device, and is a vital part of their patented "secure OS".
Microsoft might actually have to help defend Linux to protect themselves..
When you consider how much BSD code M$ has helped themselves to and the orignial lawsuit, you might have a point. But M$ knows this is all bullshit and delay.
They want to keep back the wide adoption of free software long enough to put Pladium into place, but it's not going to work. They can't convince chipmakers to sell their souls to M$ if there's enough interest in alternate software. They have found their sacrificial shill, but I doubt it will be enough. SCO's case is so weak that reasonable shops will continue ditching the M$ software that has failed them. It's not like M$, with EULAs that demand read/write access to all files, has any respect for anyone else's IP. Even if they do manage to delay, enough hardware is out there for free software adoption and the money for the latest greatest M$ junk is not.
If the Caldera people looked at their own kernel, they would have realized that they distributed it GPL, thus forgoing all the rights they now claim. You know, the fist thing that pops up under a reasonable install telling you about GNU and the GPL? The drooling morons must run Windoze on their desks, a gift from Microsoft.
It's more like their bottom line has them seeing stars. Give the lunies a telescope, they might find their way back to Earth that way.
In any event, the answer is to simply design in safegaurds....not go back to older ways just because your scared of technology...please
I have a new method of determining the "will of the people" at any given time. It works by averaging the thoughts of the entire US population and can miraculously filter out Mexican and Canadian thoughts. The result is perfect, real time democracy. I have determined that I shall be king in order to implement your will. No, I'm not going to tell you how it's done you silly ludite, just do what I say and trust me. This is so much better than that old way of sending electronic noise to vulnerable central computers.
At this point, the question arises - why are these critics wrong? What are they not understanding about the system? Rather than following up on this point, though, the reporter takes a completely different, and totally irrelevant tack, discussing public confidence in the machines.
I dissagree, the article was beautifully constructed to alarm the reader:
Expert Opinion crying for a paper trail with a link to more information
insulting and vauge official dissmisal of concerns
insulting and vauge vendor dissmisal of concerns
public ignorance and willingness to be screwed
more expert opinion, just in case you forgot
It gave you the gist of the problem, no paper trail for audit, and told you that you should be alarmed because your elected officials, backed by vendors "experts", vaugly dissmiss the problem without proof and that the public is ready to buy into it. References were given that you should follow as a responsible voter. If there was any flaw it was in not persuing the reasons for dissmisal. Calling your opponents ignorant dreamers is not very convincing.
Why bother pre-printing the cards? Also, the vote needs to be left at the polling place for autidts to be useful. The machine can print the vote after you have cast it, without any identifying information, and on verification you drop it in a box and go home. That would be a much simpler, voter verifiable, paper record.
I live in Louisiana where electronic voting machines are used. You push your votes and push a button and it chimes and that's it. It's really creepy. There's a joke going around about LA lending some of these machines to Florida, but Florida having to return them because they kept electing Edwin Edwards.
Both with very smart updaters, apt-get, deselct and up2date, and even graphical clients! It's simply amazing!
You can work for the Borg if you want, but why bother? They were supposed to make life easy for you but have only made it more difficult than it has to be.
My synopsis of all of this is that M$ wants to use windows updater to reduce their larger customers TCO. To get there, they are making thier slaves look bad so they will be fired. Releasing "patches" every two weeks so their slaves have to run all over the place? HA! As the NTBugtraq noticed, none of these patches has done anything for actual security. It all stinks of making someone's life hell before shit canning them. Combined with talk of making the admin extinct, can this be far off? It will never work because M$ has not fixed the problems that require all the extra administration and they never will. It's nuts and it will only get worse.
Blacklists do not have to violate the end to end priciple of the internet. If I run my mail server and chose to run a blackhole list on my own email, and I give my users that choice as well, no "censorship" has occured. Now, if I run a mail server and a blackhole list without asking, I have indeed violated people. It's that simple. Give people static IPs, let them run their own mailservers if they want and the rest will work itself out. Everyone has a right to speak, but no one has to listen.
I'd prefer actual laws against unsolcited comercial email. It's not really speach at all and any judge can tell the difference between a message and an advert. The fact of the matter is that the internet is a pull media and you don't have to shout to be heard. All you have to do is something interesting and people will find out. Spam is not speach, it's an abuse of a public space much like shouting in church or building billboards in the middle of a road.
It's important to distinguish these issues in order to come to the least obtrusive solution. Confusing them plays into the hands of large ISPs such as M$ and AOL who would love to be the only people alowed to annoy everyone with spam, a situation analogous to radio broadcasts. These "service" providers are screaming about how span is ruining the "internet", yet they do all in their power to leave their users powerless to do anything like run a mail server or a web site for any purpose. They also are using their own blackhole lists as a club against smaller ISPs, without giving their users a choice of spam filter. These are the policies most against the spirit of free speech and it's obvious that these "service" providers who abouts their own users would love to eliminate their competition and so end the internet as we know it.
ESR's possition paper is an excellent reference for the former case. This new letter makes that case look crafty if not honest by compairison. It's apparent that Caldera has goon off the deep end as the letter is laughable on it's own. Just look at this nonsense:
... much of Linux has been built from contributions by numerous unrelated and unknown software developers, each contributing a small section of code. There is no mechanism inherent in the Linux development process to assure that intellectual property rights, confidentiality or security are protected. The Linux process does not prevent inclusion of code that has been stolen outright, or developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts.
... As a consequence of Linux's unrestricted authoring process, it is not surprising that Linux distributors do not warrant the legal integrity of the Linux code provided to customers.
What shit on a stick, the situation is about oposite their oppinon! The recent problems Blair has given the New York Times show that NO writning process works the way Caldera claims their closed source development does. My experience with closed source software is that the "responsible" compnay has no clue about who actually wrote their code, nor do they care. Linux distributions, however, MUST know the copyright holder so that they don't get stung by including important code that someone later claims ownership to. Whereas corporate code is copyright to the company, free code is generally copyrighted by the cheif author. Indeed, I've read more about code going the other way than I've read about free coders stealing inferior ideas and code that has never seen the light of day.
Therefore legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user.... Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.
One of these things is not like the other, let's see if we can tell. The RIAA used profits from it's death grip on US music sales and radio play to crush Napster and MP3.com. They then proceeded to harrass individual users of peer to peer services and indexers of files. Caldera, a fringe player with one fewer procuct today than yesterday, is going to do what to Red Hat, IBM and other distributions? For obsensibly including code into a kernel 10 years ago? Then what will they do to individual users? They can kiss my ass. If their actual "evidence" of wrong doing is as flimsy as the reasoning in this letter, there will be nothing left of them after the first hearing.
Darl McBride, you worry about this being "unpopular"? Wake up, it's too stupid to be taken seriously Your efforts to own things you contributed little or nothing too reek of disrepect of intelectual property and your broad deffintions make a moquery of legitimate claims. Do us all a favor, give yourself a golden parachute, kick yourself in the balls a few times, say, "I'm sorry" to all your customers and the rest of the free software world and call it even. Your company won't have much to reward you with when all of this is said and done.
It's ample ammunition for anyone who hates Linux and wants to argue against it.
What a crock. This suit is so stupid that the RIAA might be embarassed by their mention. More importanly, there are no cost/performace competitors to free software. Even if we assume justice is for sale, Caldera is going to be crushed by much deeper pockets. The CEO of Caldera must think he is Napoleon too.
Yep, M$ is fucked and the landslide is on. Thanks to the "We own your data" attitude enshrined in the EULAs and the US TIAA, they are going to have a tough time giving their sofware away to forgein governments. Given the proven higher TCO, giving the software away might not be cheap enough. You can imagine what that kind of news is going to do to M$ sales.
The only serious question left is how far the US Government will go to prop M$ up. Will they pull a rescue like they did for Chrysler? Will they step up government buying and force that garbage on offices and schools? Will they make Next Generation laws? The rest of the world might wriggle free, but there are many unAmerican things M$ can get done here before they go away. I think they should be alowed to fail like so many of the software companies they ruined and so many telcoms that have gone under. The ideological fight between TIAA and real free market advocates will be something for all to see.
Wow, you said pirce, support, stability and Windows in the same sentenc as if Microsoft offered an advantage in any of these things. That's funny.
On the licensing front, it's more like the mask is off. M$'s recent licensing was every bit as bad as the "zealots" and other free software advocates have said it would be all along. The Next Generation looks even worse than all but the most paranoid visions could predict. There, bare faced, is the power hungry monster we all worried about. It's not easy to force that on forgien governments and others who have considered things.
By default apps (including Outlook) run with the permissions of the user.
Last time I read anything, Outlook ran as "Admin". Looking through Google found me little more than a confused, propriatory mass of rights, permissions and predefined "users" such as contributor, author and what not. Somehow, I get the feeling that it's impossibly inconvinent to have your users anything but administrators in the windoze world. The unix and free software worlds make user management very easy and you have to go out of your way to do it wrong. It's built into the kernel and filesystem not tacked onto the GUI. Tell me that it's not so and that M$ has learned something and I'll be able to forget what I've read and what I just saw in 10 minutes of searching.
minitel. Yeah, they offer terminal emulation for your pc though their isp so that you can pay twice for the service.
Minitel is as a good demonstration of what the world would be without the internet and it's open philosopy. Minitel's intelligence is all in the network, and all of it's publications are tightly controlled by a central authority. They did a fine job, arguably as good as could be done this way. While many useful servcices can be offered, they miss out on the blessings of liberty. Even under tight controls, the thing has evolved in ways they did not expect. We know that evolution is stunted from the services that people have invented for the web. The closest thing we have to that control here is M$ and their death grip on their platform. The world wide web is not only difficult to use under their naked browser, it's dangerous. Free browsers work better at getting the content you are intersted in while protecting the privacy and eyballs of the user. The less central control that's had in electronic publishing, the better off we all are.
Debian, it's like your first visit to the free clinic. Your privates are sore, you are angry with close frinds and you don't like what people at the clinic are telling you. You can leave and things will get worse or you can listen to good advice and not have to go back.
It stores encrypted data on your PC. You cannot use any method to decrypt this data to determine what keystrokes were collected and potentially transmitted.
Gotta love stupid laws.
Don't worry, the DMCA only applies to circumvention of encryption used to protect huge, rich, multinational coporations and other people trying to make a buck. I doubt anyone would care if you cirumvented encryption to recover your or other people's keystrokes. Britiany Spears's recorded music is protected. Her email, medical records and what not are owned by TIAA and whoever can make a buck selling them. Pluto-crats ain't stoopid.
Avoid these problems and use free software instead. Give the man the finger before he decides that you can't.
And '.vbs' is in a similar position on Windows to '.sh' on Unix. What Windows needs to do is assocate _opening_ a.vbs file with loading it in Notepad or the Visual Basic editor or something equally harmless, and for there to be a separate operation of _running_ files which has to be invoked explicitly (and not just by double-clicking).
Ah! Why can't the M$ dummies do like every other reasonable OS and implement file permisions and owners within the file system? An email client that does not make attachmets executable by default serves the same purpose as burdening the user with associating a file type with a text editor. Double click on a file and you will get a dialog asking you what you want to use to open the file and if you want it to rmember the file type. It won't just run the script because it's not executable and won't be unless the mail client itself changes it, which is a lot of trouble to go through to duplicate a M$ brain dead thing.
Associating vbs with notepad goes a long way toward defeating the GUI, simply to overcome the faults of your mail client and file system. vbs is designed to be easy for the user to understand and create. Having to left click the darned things and click "run" rather than being able to drag and drop files onto it or double click it like a "real" program, is a real pain. Of course, the short commings still exist with the exe files and all the problems in file representation and permissions will get you there and can't be defended against with the silly notepad hack.
The best hope is a user interface that clearly distinguishes between *running a program* and *opening a document*. Windows over the years has deliberately blurred this
Don't forget to include an email client that does not run as root and does not execute stuff without asking the user! M$ thinks it so much more important to have email that "works" by blaring noises and flashing picutes at you. Even if these glaring problems could be fixed on Windoze, the lack of distinction you noticed still demands a complete GUI overhaul.
The last windoze box I looked at was extreemly confusing and had very poor demarcation of executables. Instead of having a the distinction built into the file system and respected by the kernel, windoze users must memorize extensions like exe, vb, scr and a host of other. Even if the user memorized all the extension names, the M$ interface hides the extension by default and only one mode of file repersentation, "detailed" displays the file type. Even if the user is clever enough to unclick the "hide estension" button, you can still be fooled by the display which is icons by default. Microsoft's mail client is worse. "ILoveYou.jpg_with_many_spaces_here.exe" shows up as "ILoveYou.jpg" in outlook's brain dead display of attachments as ichons with about 12 characters of text under them. We can hardly fault the user for wanting to look at a picture. The dilligent user must drag the picture to an open file broswer to see the file type. Most take the interface and the mail at face value and double click away, especially if the message came fron a trusted friend who was also infected.
One way of explaining this in non-technical language is: 'If I sent you a letter and it said "please jump off the nearest cliff" and you read it, would it do any harm to you? Why should the equivalent message sent to a computer be any different?'
A mail from a friend asking you to look at a picture can hardly be seen as them asking you t jump off a cliff. Most people would not even see the request as one to throw their computer off a cliff.
I predict the "slashdot effect" won't be working today. All the troll bots will be bussy running fizzer and unable to lauch their usual malicious strikes. Most other sites are capable of riding out normal traffic generated by Slashdot. The fizzer task force is working well right now. Go away, all your bots is broke and Billy G. is going to be angry with you.
And, once this story is published, we'll observe the various effects of futile desperation!
If you want your bots back, tell him to push something through windoze updater and make it fast. I hope you suffer the usual M$ delays. The IRC people will be happy if you can speed things up.
"The soundness of a nation's currency is essential to the soundness of its economy. And to uphold our currency's soundness, it must be recognized and honored as legal tender and counterfeiting must be effectively thwarted,''
So, the entire US economy is dependent on the government prventing people from publishing small bills that are backed soley by small bills. It's incredible that everyone's motivation to show up to work is those little pieces of paper. It's a wonder such a system can be stable. Even savages have enough sense to use shells or other objects that have a use as a store of value.
Slashdot Mirror
In further news, I'd like to announce that I am patenting the "ON/OFF" switch, a convenient device that enables safe, secure, and easy-to-use initiation and termination of electric current through a device.
pThat's the ultimate M$ internet security device, and is a vital part of their patented "secure OS".
The CFO got some out of 7,000 shares March 12. The disgusting thing is that their share value has doubled since they started making this noise. Who's buying this shit?
When you consider how much BSD code M$ has helped themselves to and the orignial lawsuit, you might have a point. But M$ knows this is all bullshit and delay.
They want to keep back the wide adoption of free software long enough to put Pladium into place, but it's not going to work. They can't convince chipmakers to sell their souls to M$ if there's enough interest in alternate software. They have found their sacrificial shill, but I doubt it will be enough. SCO's case is so weak that reasonable shops will continue ditching the M$ software that has failed them. It's not like M$, with EULAs that demand read/write access to all files, has any respect for anyone else's IP. Even if they do manage to delay, enough hardware is out there for free software adoption and the money for the latest greatest M$ junk is not.
If the Caldera people looked at their own kernel, they would have realized that they distributed it GPL, thus forgoing all the rights they now claim. You know, the fist thing that pops up under a reasonable install telling you about GNU and the GPL? The drooling morons must run Windoze on their desks, a gift from Microsoft.
It's more like their bottom line has them seeing stars. Give the lunies a telescope, they might find their way back to Earth that way.
-and you thought you were so witty.
I have a new method of determining the "will of the people" at any given time. It works by averaging the thoughts of the entire US population and can miraculously filter out Mexican and Canadian thoughts. The result is perfect, real time democracy. I have determined that I shall be king in order to implement your will. No, I'm not going to tell you how it's done you silly ludite, just do what I say and trust me. This is so much better than that old way of sending electronic noise to vulnerable central computers.
I dissagree, the article was beautifully constructed to alarm the reader:
It gave you the gist of the problem, no paper trail for audit, and told you that you should be alarmed because your elected officials, backed by vendors "experts", vaugly dissmiss the problem without proof and that the public is ready to buy into it. References were given that you should follow as a responsible voter. If there was any flaw it was in not persuing the reasons for dissmisal. Calling your opponents ignorant dreamers is not very convincing.
Another poster has done a nice job of explaining one large problem with a paperless voting system.
I live in Louisiana where electronic voting machines are used. You push your votes and push a button and it chimes and that's it. It's really creepy. There's a joke going around about LA lending some of these machines to Florida, but Florida having to return them because they kept electing Edwin Edwards.
Both with very smart updaters, apt-get, deselct and up2date, and even graphical clients! It's simply amazing!
You can work for the Borg if you want, but why bother? They were supposed to make life easy for you but have only made it more difficult than it has to be.
My synopsis of all of this is that M$ wants to use windows updater to reduce their larger customers TCO. To get there, they are making thier slaves look bad so they will be fired. Releasing "patches" every two weeks so their slaves have to run all over the place? HA! As the NTBugtraq noticed, none of these patches has done anything for actual security. It all stinks of making someone's life hell before shit canning them. Combined with talk of making the admin extinct, can this be far off? It will never work because M$ has not fixed the problems that require all the extra administration and they never will. It's nuts and it will only get worse.
Still think those alternatives above are silly?
I'd prefer actual laws against unsolcited comercial email. It's not really speach at all and any judge can tell the difference between a message and an advert. The fact of the matter is that the internet is a pull media and you don't have to shout to be heard. All you have to do is something interesting and people will find out. Spam is not speach, it's an abuse of a public space much like shouting in church or building billboards in the middle of a road.
It's important to distinguish these issues in order to come to the least obtrusive solution. Confusing them plays into the hands of large ISPs such as M$ and AOL who would love to be the only people alowed to annoy everyone with spam, a situation analogous to radio broadcasts. These "service" providers are screaming about how span is ruining the "internet", yet they do all in their power to leave their users powerless to do anything like run a mail server or a web site for any purpose. They also are using their own blackhole lists as a club against smaller ISPs, without giving their users a choice of spam filter. These are the policies most against the spirit of free speech and it's obvious that these "service" providers who abouts their own users would love to eliminate their competition and so end the internet as we know it.
ESR's possition paper is an excellent reference for the former case. This new letter makes that case look crafty if not honest by compairison. It's apparent that Caldera has goon off the deep end as the letter is laughable on it's own. Just look at this nonsense:
... As a consequence of Linux's unrestricted authoring process, it is not surprising that Linux distributors do not warrant the legal integrity of the Linux code provided to customers.
What shit on a stick, the situation is about oposite their oppinon! The recent problems Blair has given the New York Times show that NO writning process works the way Caldera claims their closed source development does. My experience with closed source software is that the "responsible" compnay has no clue about who actually wrote their code, nor do they care. Linux distributions, however, MUST know the copyright holder so that they don't get stung by including important code that someone later claims ownership to. Whereas corporate code is copyright to the company, free code is generally copyrighted by the cheif author. Indeed, I've read more about code going the other way than I've read about free coders stealing inferior ideas and code that has never seen the light of day.
Therefore legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user. ... Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.
One of these things is not like the other, let's see if we can tell. The RIAA used profits from it's death grip on US music sales and radio play to crush Napster and MP3.com. They then proceeded to harrass individual users of peer to peer services and indexers of files. Caldera, a fringe player with one fewer procuct today than yesterday, is going to do what to Red Hat, IBM and other distributions? For obsensibly including code into a kernel 10 years ago? Then what will they do to individual users? They can kiss my ass. If their actual "evidence" of wrong doing is as flimsy as the reasoning in this letter, there will be nothing left of them after the first hearing.
Darl McBride, you worry about this being "unpopular"? Wake up, it's too stupid to be taken seriously Your efforts to own things you contributed little or nothing too reek of disrepect of intelectual property and your broad deffintions make a moquery of legitimate claims. Do us all a favor, give yourself a golden parachute, kick yourself in the balls a few times, say, "I'm sorry" to all your customers and the rest of the free software world and call it even. Your company won't have much to reward you with when all of this is said and done.
What a crock. This suit is so stupid that the RIAA might be embarassed by their mention. More importanly, there are no cost/performace competitors to free software. Even if we assume justice is for sale, Caldera is going to be crushed by much deeper pockets. The CEO of Caldera must think he is Napoleon too.
We always knew what windows was worth and that the high costs of ownership were hard to justify. I like seeing people say it.
You must also have a low value of your reputation and cusotmer's data.
The only serious question left is how far the US Government will go to prop M$ up. Will they pull a rescue like they did for Chrysler? Will they step up government buying and force that garbage on offices and schools? Will they make Next Generation laws? The rest of the world might wriggle free, but there are many unAmerican things M$ can get done here before they go away. I think they should be alowed to fail like so many of the software companies they ruined and so many telcoms that have gone under. The ideological fight between TIAA and real free market advocates will be something for all to see.
On the licensing front, it's more like the mask is off. M$'s recent licensing was every bit as bad as the "zealots" and other free software advocates have said it would be all along. The Next Generation looks even worse than all but the most paranoid visions could predict. There, bare faced, is the power hungry monster we all worried about. It's not easy to force that on forgien governments and others who have considered things.
Last time I read anything, Outlook ran as "Admin". Looking through Google found me little more than a confused, propriatory mass of rights, permissions and predefined "users" such as contributor, author and what not. Somehow, I get the feeling that it's impossibly inconvinent to have your users anything but administrators in the windoze world. The unix and free software worlds make user management very easy and you have to go out of your way to do it wrong. It's built into the kernel and filesystem not tacked onto the GUI. Tell me that it's not so and that M$ has learned something and I'll be able to forget what I've read and what I just saw in 10 minutes of searching.
While I can say that Paris is a wonderful place, you are not much of a hacker if you have to go there to break into their computers.
Minitel is as a good demonstration of what the world would be without the internet and it's open philosopy. Minitel's intelligence is all in the network, and all of it's publications are tightly controlled by a central authority. They did a fine job, arguably as good as could be done this way. While many useful servcices can be offered, they miss out on the blessings of liberty. Even under tight controls, the thing has evolved in ways they did not expect. We know that evolution is stunted from the services that people have invented for the web. The closest thing we have to that control here is M$ and their death grip on their platform. The world wide web is not only difficult to use under their naked browser, it's dangerous. Free browsers work better at getting the content you are intersted in while protecting the privacy and eyballs of the user. The less central control that's had in electronic publishing, the better off we all are.
Debian, it's like your first visit to the free clinic. Your privates are sore, you are angry with close frinds and you don't like what people at the clinic are telling you. You can leave and things will get worse or you can listen to good advice and not have to go back.
Gotta love stupid laws.
Don't worry, the DMCA only applies to circumvention of encryption used to protect huge, rich, multinational coporations and other people trying to make a buck. I doubt anyone would care if you cirumvented encryption to recover your or other people's keystrokes. Britiany Spears's recorded music is protected. Her email, medical records and what not are owned by TIAA and whoever can make a buck selling them. Pluto-crats ain't stoopid.
Avoid these problems and use free software instead. Give the man the finger before he decides that you can't.
Ah! Why can't the M$ dummies do like every other reasonable OS and implement file permisions and owners within the file system? An email client that does not make attachmets executable by default serves the same purpose as burdening the user with associating a file type with a text editor. Double click on a file and you will get a dialog asking you what you want to use to open the file and if you want it to rmember the file type. It won't just run the script because it's not executable and won't be unless the mail client itself changes it, which is a lot of trouble to go through to duplicate a M$ brain dead thing.
Associating vbs with notepad goes a long way toward defeating the GUI, simply to overcome the faults of your mail client and file system. vbs is designed to be easy for the user to understand and create. Having to left click the darned things and click "run" rather than being able to drag and drop files onto it or double click it like a "real" program, is a real pain. Of course, the short commings still exist with the exe files and all the problems in file representation and permissions will get you there and can't be defended against with the silly notepad hack.
The blame is obvious because everyone told M$ not to make things like this before they did it.
Don't forget to include an email client that does not run as root and does not execute stuff without asking the user! M$ thinks it so much more important to have email that "works" by blaring noises and flashing picutes at you. Even if these glaring problems could be fixed on Windoze, the lack of distinction you noticed still demands a complete GUI overhaul.
The last windoze box I looked at was extreemly confusing and had very poor demarcation of executables. Instead of having a the distinction built into the file system and respected by the kernel, windoze users must memorize extensions like exe, vb, scr and a host of other. Even if the user memorized all the extension names, the M$ interface hides the extension by default and only one mode of file repersentation, "detailed" displays the file type. Even if the user is clever enough to unclick the "hide estension" button, you can still be fooled by the display which is icons by default. Microsoft's mail client is worse. "ILoveYou.jpg_with_many_spaces_here.exe" shows up as "ILoveYou.jpg" in outlook's brain dead display of attachments as ichons with about 12 characters of text under them. We can hardly fault the user for wanting to look at a picture. The dilligent user must drag the picture to an open file broswer to see the file type. Most take the interface and the mail at face value and double click away, especially if the message came fron a trusted friend who was also infected.
One way of explaining this in non-technical language is: 'If I sent you a letter and it said "please jump off the nearest cliff" and you read it, would it do any harm to you? Why should the equivalent message sent to a computer be any different?'
A mail from a friend asking you to look at a picture can hardly be seen as them asking you t jump off a cliff. Most people would not even see the request as one to throw their computer off a cliff.
And, once this story is published, we'll observe the various effects of futile desperation!
If you want your bots back, tell him to push something through windoze updater and make it fast. I hope you suffer the usual M$ delays. The IRC people will be happy if you can speed things up.
So, the entire US economy is dependent on the government prventing people from publishing small bills that are backed soley by small bills. It's incredible that everyone's motivation to show up to work is those little pieces of paper. It's a wonder such a system can be stable. Even savages have enough sense to use shells or other objects that have a use as a store of value.