I would clearly and calmly present the risk and the cost. Who is going to own cleanup if there is an exploit? Where will THAT money come from.
Remember that managers are there to solve YOUR problems, in theory anyways. They help keep your plate clean so you can focus on task. Present the risks, and let them own this issue and whatever the outcome is you did the right thing.
You might simply protect yourselves by forcing the IE6 and IE7 systems to use a web proxy that DOESN'T allow outside Internet access. You can install Squid proxy for Windows for free (there are also freeware and shareware proxies also of course). That way even if someone disregards common sense or "rules", they can't go anywhere unsafe. Policy Editor can prevent users from changing the proxy or network settings.
Actually, the poster hypothetically suggested "block port 25 from home connections completely " which to me means both directions.
Anonymous Coward is being deliberately obtuse, but blocking port 25 in both directions.. I support that 100%. Home users shouldn't be on port 25. I don't want MY residental Internet costs raised and my network uplink clogged.
I suspect Anonymous Coward is the type of user to deliberately disregard his ISP's suggestion to use Authenticated SMTP because the email client that came with his pirated Windows 2000 does not support it.
Actually the solution to the problem is to punish vendors who ship products full of unintentional backdoors and vulnerabilities. Sanction them. Treat them like they are critical pieces of infrastructure -- they ask to be taken seriously for this, so hold them to it. Haul them before Congress and TVs. I'd love to see Steve Balmer cry in front of Congress (although he's a likable rich American who contributes to elections... Congress would rather shake his hand and pose for pictures).
Neither PDFs nor Flash nor a freakin web browser nor plugging in a MEMORY STICK or USB battery charger... none of this should be able to escalate permissions to start frackin with the system files.
Unix email clients (like Thunderbird) don't OFFER to enable execution of scripts sent to your Inbox. Most Linux users these days get by just fine with their desktop, and install apps through Ubuntu Software Center and that's about it.
This type of crap doesn't happen on UNIX not because it has fewer users, but because years before DOS existed UNIX systems were networked, shared, and running trusted and untrusted users on the same physical server. Once hashed out, these policies remained in place. It took untill Vista and Windows 7 for Microsoft to even begin leveraging these UNIX ideas, and even now a lot of it is single-line-of-defense.
>Golly, I wish some of those people worked at Microsoft.
Give Microsoft employees credit - I'm sure some of them saw this coming and did protest. I'm equally sure that Marketing or Sales came in and put their foot down, claiming it's ONLY an attack vector if the bad guys MAKE IT ONE... and then point out how using this attack vector is the same exact thing as using metal cutters on a padlock.
(Those paying attention would note there IS no padlock...)
I would be skeptical of any claim that even a "majority" of such websites were based on Windows. For a hosting provider, the extra hardware cost AND still lower performance of Windows just isn't worth it. Toss in higher licensing fees and a "pray to the black box" method of support, and you have yourself a losing business.
Now it's true that a SLIGHT majority of *parked/empty domains* might resolve to Windows webservers. I think that's what you meant, but spinning it the way you have done is... well, incredibly dishonest of you.
But you did not balance your statement... denaturing is meant to make you FEEL sick so you don't want to drink the stuff. If you pushed past the nausea and drank the stuff anyways, you will NOT die with denatured alcohol.
This was just government sanctioned murder for political purposes.
What about all those monkeys who died from marijuana? The smoke was SO potent that they asphyxiated!
For those who don't know, this is tongue in cheek. Government financed research actually knowingly choked monkeys to death so they could build a public safety argument against marijuana.
That was just a cover story... the REAL fear of the right wing was that their elite women would start DANCING with "jazz musicians" (which is code for 'negro'). That's right, if you smoke pot you will be of loose morals and cavort with the Other Races.
It's not a surprise that the right wing is still against legalization, even if their arguments have changed.
Are you deliberately trying to be deceptively misleading?
LOTS of people make alcohol at home, or at brew-on-premises, including myself.
It's true that DISTILLING can concentrate certain chemicals like methanol, but even then the dangers have ALWAYS been overstated by those who support prohibition (either from those on the left who wish for a nanny state, or those on the right with Christian fundamentalist views). It's good to know that at least some of these illnesses were NOT due to the alcohol, but evil men seeking to poison others.
It's funny how all the big-business fat cats claim that "socialized healthcare" is bad for SMALL business, when yeah... lack of affordable self insurance is the PRIMARY reason many dreamers never give their nagging small business idea a go...
You can't even effectively cut off the rest of the world as you state. Assuming you blacken all satellite and undersea cables, you'd also have to cut all landlines as well, or someone can dial into the US-Internet.
And even cutting landlines would not be effective, as satellite phones cross all national boundaries. You'd have to blast those out of the sky also... all of them, including your own.
If a war like this happens, I hope we survive enough to defile the graves of every one of our leaders who opted to CUT education funds in the US, while at the same time strategizing how to move as much US technology leadership as possible to China and as quickly as possible. All for tax breaks on the rich, they created a dependency that Columbian drug lords would be jealous of.
You obviously don't worry about backdoors in routers, switches, network cards, motherboard BIOS, etc. What if I am China and I use one of these to rootkit your box. I might not be out for damage, but just to collect intelligence. How would you KNOW?
next let's assume you have an inkling something's going on. Are you going to rebuild the Windows kernel on a safe PC, checksum it, then bring it and all the other files to repair the damage? Unlikely for many reasons.
So you start to rebuild your PC from the install CD, disconnected from the net. Except before the connection was broken, one of your many BIOS and flash memory banks were told to harbor a rootkit and slip it back in.
There's a REASON the Chinese Government is paying for the education of their brightest over in the US. It isn't just because we're content to bleed jobs in the name of cutting education to keep taxes low. These Chinese stay in the US or gain "dual citizenship", and go on to high levels in US corporations... Sun, Cisco, etc. If these backdoors were disguised as "bugs" (overflow, race condition, etc) then we'd find some of these - like we do now - but we would not find them ALL.
And yes, lots of these mission critical systems are not supposed to be on the net, but they are in some form. Just recount the US power blackout from about 6 years ago.. that was a virus on a LAN that managed to get across a supposedly secure network and onto the "enterprise" systems.
You wouldn't even know you were at cyberwar until all the necessary damage was done.
With the rise of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Microsoft ceased furthering the development of "free" (gratis) programming languages which came BUNDLED with the computer. Microsoft could have BUNDLED Visual Basic, and therefore empower their users the way that Commodore and Atari and even Apple (via Hypercard) tried to do... but instead Microsoft gambled it all on creating a *dependant* consumer class of users. That's why there was never a community of Windows users loyally subscribing to computer education magazines, and typing in program listings (the best way to learn programming). As soon as Windows became #1, all of these educational methods died.
Today most computer users do not know anything about computers. They just know rote clicks which is knowledge with a short shelf life... only until the next version of said Windows product (go into any used bookstore and check out the pricing on say a 3 year old used book for UNIX/Linux and one for Windows... the Windows book is usually under $1 because Vb6 knowledge was made worthless... while a book on Python 2.5 or PHP 5.0 still has loads of value). It's no surprise that some of the best programmers started out on these old 8 and 16 bit systems, and they're better not because these platforms were superior to today's.. no they're better because they were exposed to problem solving an an earlier age. That does not happen today.
I missed the days when PC's came with multiple programming languages for free... then I found Linux, and I realized it wasn't true that these things went away... only that Microsoft wasn't interested in hooking young kids on programming the way Atari, BBC, Apple and Commodore wanted to do (and did so well, for the time they were relevent)
Linux has no KNOWN EoP vulnerabilities at the moment, while Windows does.
You are just one of those "Well if Linux were more popular it would be less secure" types.. that validates your choice, but it's not true that FireFox and your email client would suddenly start running as root and auto-chmod 777 on everything you download.
When an EoP IS discovered on Linux, it is quickly patched... and this will really piss you off.. the bug is fixed WITHOUT first doing a cost/benefit study the way Microsoft operates.
On Windows, Microsoft can take their time, and even threaten researchers with a Cease and Desist.
It took a lot of work for Microsoft to get IE to run as something other than the current user context... unfortunately this is all an AFTERTHOUGHT.. Windows wasn't designed to run in user process sandboxes, so when they bolt these things onto an app, it is only a matter of time before a weakness is found.
Wrong - you are ignorant on this topic. Otherwise, please explain EXACTLY how an unprivileged user goes about installing malware. They don't have rights to do anything "stupid"...
That's a strawman argument. It's natural for security minded folks to "jab" at Microsoft (in a manner similar to how safety advocates "jab" at lead-painted Chinese toys).
On a SANE OS, rootkits can't be installed by regular users who are viewing a banner ad, or plugging in a storage device like a memory stick or USB picture frame.
Fake is a broad definition but simple to describe: it's unauthorized and unsupported by Cisco.
Trying to determine if the fakes are "0% accurate" or "50% accurate" is not really possible, given all the small parts and encrypted firmware, etc. It's counterfit.
It's not like memory dumps don't ever get dumped there if you had an OS crash, and it's not like memory dumps would ever contain user data like user passwords. There's user data in there. Where does the REGISTRY get saved???
I have a system running Debian here, the installation is 12 years old. I installed it once from CD I bought 12 years ago (CheapBytes ).
I continue to get modern support. I expect you to argue "but you DID have to upgrade the OS", but the point is artifical and moot. "Upgrades" on Linux are just like "updates", except bundled together. Doesn't really matter if you get your security updates from an "update" or an "upgrade", so long as you get it. You have free "new versions" of software for LIFE on Linux.
Nobody holds onto old versions of Linux because they pirated an install key that doesn't work anymore on new versions, or crap like that which is part of the norm.
You don't have to like Linux, but your argument here is a bit "loaded" and in a context that has no meaning in Linux.
>Nobody ships with all of the W3C published recommendations. That's just stupid. You can't hit a moving target like that.
No no no no... red herring... you've been misled.
A browser does NOT need to support all W3C recommendations. This is true for all browsers, even for IE.
What all browsers are EXPECTED to do is - "if" they support a recommendation - that they do what the recommendation SPECIFIES. In other words, you choose to a CSS attribute CORRECT.. or do it NOT AT ALL. IE would randomly do something *undefined* instead of nothing.
Web developers literally spent YEARS reverse-engineering the exact behavior of Microsoft's undocumented standard. Had Microsoft not done anything at all with certain elements, the behavior would be quickly understood.
I'll give you an example: IE 6 and 7 would recognize many attributes for CSS padding and margins. IE would certainly do something with these attributes... but what they did was the OPPOSITE of the specs in some cases. Not only that, but the inheritance rules were not consistent. You literally had to write 2X the CSS code if you wanted your web-standards code to work on IE6.
This worked well for Microsoft - they essentially killed all progress on the web for a DECADE. Companies who locked themselves into IE6-based intranets did not care because there was no FireFox and no basis for Microsoft to put out new browser technology. MS wanted people to give up on HTML and just write everything in.NET. This is a holdover from the Microsoft "Blackbird" project, which seriously wanted to replace web HTML with compiled binary Microsoft-patented markup. Bill Gate's emails in the trial said he didn't want their bugs fixed if they were only causing problems in non-Microsoft browsers.
When a browser does not support an effect, you can easily workaround it. For example, if I couldn't assign a yellow background to an link, I could easily change course and wrap the A in a DIV and assign the style there instead. But what if the link color ceased to be yellow whenever that DIV was positioned with absolute instead of relative? What if the link disappeared whenever the DIV was inside a BODY tag which had a CSS background attribute?
It's the *random* nature of MSIE bugs (and the arrogance of not fixing them) that made web developers the most vocal critics of Microsoft.
if FireFox versions have issues with following the standard wrong, that gets fixed but it also is published what versions had that bug. So it's easy to design around without self-doubting your markup and CSS. You still can't go to the Microsoft website and get a solid definition of their CSS Box Model bugs.
So, what percentage of W3 that gets implemented is not ever an issue; it's the quality and the truthfulness of the implementation.
OK, so is your point that you want OTHER nations to stop advancing, just because you want them to?
I've never met a "less government libertarian" who didn't ALSO have a boatload of their 401 invested in countries who benefit from the very same policies they object to at home. Which makes me wonder... if it were less tax-favorable to invest outside the USA, would conservative-leaning Americans suddenly be FOR public healthcare and public education (the useful kind, not high school)? I think the answer is yes.
And if you think tax dollar giveaways to healthcare are LESS under the current system, you're not paying attention. The status of the US healthcare even forbids Medicare - BY LAW - from negotiating pharmaceutical prices... something all the private insurers can -and- do.
In an age of fast moving populations, diseases, and bio-terrorism it's pretty "pound foolish" for a nation not even offer free _preventative_ healthcare and checkups.
And I know someone who personally suffered because an insurance company got between the patient and their doctor...
Wait... the President should be walled off from the public, safe within his bubble of Washington advisors... and if too many of the unwashed masses make contact with him, he will gain dictatorial powers??
I get that you're trying to say that the public should not be able to micro-manage it's government. Totally understandable. But given the abuse of the fillibuster in Congress, it takes a disaster (natural or man-made) to get the Government to do anything.
Also, remember, the LAST President could not even USE a computer never mind social media, and "the Decider" did have and use dictatorial powers to strip other Americans of their Constitutional rights, without trial. I wouldn't so quickly connect the two things.
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I would clearly and calmly present the risk and the cost. Who is going to own cleanup if there is an exploit? Where will THAT money come from.
Remember that managers are there to solve YOUR problems, in theory anyways. They help keep your plate clean so you can focus on task. Present the risks, and let them own this issue and whatever the outcome is you did the right thing.
You might simply protect yourselves by forcing the IE6 and IE7 systems to use a web proxy that DOESN'T allow outside Internet access.
You can install Squid proxy for Windows for free (there are also freeware and shareware proxies also of course).
That way even if someone disregards common sense or "rules", they can't go anywhere unsafe. Policy Editor can prevent users from changing the proxy or network settings.
Actually, the poster hypothetically suggested "block port 25 from home connections completely " which to me means both directions.
Anonymous Coward is being deliberately obtuse, but blocking port 25 in both directions.. I support that 100%.
Home users shouldn't be on port 25.
I don't want MY residental Internet costs raised and my network uplink clogged.
I suspect Anonymous Coward is the type of user to deliberately disregard his ISP's suggestion to use Authenticated SMTP because the email client that came with his pirated Windows 2000 does not support it.
Actually the solution to the problem is to punish vendors who ship products full of unintentional backdoors and vulnerabilities. Sanction them. Treat them like they are critical pieces of infrastructure -- they ask to be taken seriously for this, so hold them to it. Haul them before Congress and TVs. I'd love to see Steve Balmer cry in front of Congress (although he's a likable rich American who contributes to elections... Congress would rather shake his hand and pose for pictures).
Neither PDFs nor Flash nor a freakin web browser nor plugging in a MEMORY STICK or USB battery charger... none of this should be able to escalate permissions to start frackin with the system files.
Unix email clients (like Thunderbird) don't OFFER to enable execution of scripts sent to your Inbox. Most Linux users these days get by just fine with their desktop, and install apps through Ubuntu Software Center and that's about it.
This type of crap doesn't happen on UNIX not because it has fewer users, but because years before DOS existed UNIX systems were networked, shared, and running trusted and untrusted users on the same physical server. Once hashed out, these policies remained in place. It took untill Vista and Windows 7 for Microsoft to even begin leveraging these UNIX ideas, and even now a lot of it is single-line-of-defense.
>Golly, I wish some of those people worked at Microsoft.
Give Microsoft employees credit - I'm sure some of them saw this coming and did protest.
I'm equally sure that Marketing or Sales came in and put their foot down, claiming it's ONLY an attack vector if the bad guys MAKE IT ONE... and then point out how using this attack vector is the same exact thing as using metal cutters on a padlock.
(Those paying attention would note there IS no padlock...)
>Hmmmm... being communists or being pwned by communists... decisions, decisions...
One could also point out the symbiotic relationship between China's Communist Government and America's Republican party.
They both are so intertwined and interdependent that (at the top levels at least) there is no distinguishing them.
99% huh? Bullshit.
I would be skeptical of any claim that even a "majority" of such websites were based on Windows. For a hosting provider, the extra hardware cost AND still lower performance of Windows just isn't worth it. Toss in higher licensing fees and a "pray to the black box" method of support, and you have yourself a losing business.
Now it's true that a SLIGHT majority of *parked/empty domains* might resolve to Windows webservers. I think that's what you meant, but spinning it the way you have done is... well, incredibly dishonest of you.
Somehow I don't think you would respond to any logical counter argument, since you're so far removed from making a logical one yourself.
But you did not balance your statement... denaturing is meant to make you FEEL sick so you don't want to drink the stuff. If you pushed past the nausea and drank the stuff anyways, you will NOT die with denatured alcohol.
This was just government sanctioned murder for political purposes.
What about all those monkeys who died from marijuana? The smoke was SO potent that they asphyxiated!
For those who don't know, this is tongue in cheek. Government financed research actually knowingly choked monkeys to death so they could build a public safety argument against marijuana.
That was just a cover story... the REAL fear of the right wing was that their elite women would start DANCING with "jazz musicians" (which is code for 'negro'). That's right, if you smoke pot you will be of loose morals and cavort with the Other Races.
It's not a surprise that the right wing is still against legalization, even if their arguments have changed.
Are you deliberately trying to be deceptively misleading?
LOTS of people make alcohol at home, or at brew-on-premises, including myself.
It's true that DISTILLING can concentrate certain chemicals like methanol, but even then the dangers have ALWAYS been overstated by those who support prohibition (either from those on the left who wish for a nanny state, or those on the right with Christian fundamentalist views). It's good to know that at least some of these illnesses were NOT due to the alcohol, but evil men seeking to poison others.
It's funny how all the big-business fat cats claim that "socialized healthcare" is bad for SMALL business, when yeah... lack of affordable self insurance is the PRIMARY reason many dreamers never give their nagging small business idea a go...
You can't even effectively cut off the rest of the world as you state. Assuming you blacken all satellite and undersea cables, you'd also have to cut all landlines as well, or someone can dial into the US-Internet.
And even cutting landlines would not be effective, as satellite phones cross all national boundaries. You'd have to blast those out of the sky also... all of them, including your own.
If a war like this happens, I hope we survive enough to defile the graves of every one of our leaders who opted to CUT education funds in the US, while at the same time strategizing how to move as much US technology leadership as possible to China and as quickly as possible. All for tax breaks on the rich, they created a dependency that Columbian drug lords would be jealous of.
You obviously don't worry about backdoors in routers, switches, network cards, motherboard BIOS, etc.
What if I am China and I use one of these to rootkit your box. I might not be out for damage, but just to collect intelligence. How would you KNOW?
next let's assume you have an inkling something's going on.
Are you going to rebuild the Windows kernel on a safe PC, checksum it, then bring it and all the other files to repair the damage?
Unlikely for many reasons.
So you start to rebuild your PC from the install CD, disconnected from the net. Except before the connection was broken, one of your many BIOS and flash memory banks were told to harbor a rootkit and slip it back in.
There's a REASON the Chinese Government is paying for the education of their brightest over in the US. It isn't just because we're content to bleed jobs in the name of cutting education to keep taxes low.
These Chinese stay in the US or gain "dual citizenship", and go on to high levels in US corporations... Sun, Cisco, etc.
If these backdoors were disguised as "bugs" (overflow, race condition, etc) then we'd find some of these - like we do now - but we would not find them ALL.
And yes, lots of these mission critical systems are not supposed to be on the net, but they are in some form. Just recount the US power blackout from about 6 years ago.. that was a virus on a LAN that managed to get across a supposedly secure network and onto the "enterprise" systems.
You wouldn't even know you were at cyberwar until all the necessary damage was done.
>You *do* know that a regulation-heavy environment favors big business, not small business, right?
This is a fallacy which assumes - in the ABSENCE of governments - that humans are greater than corporations.
Yeah, right.
>here I was just about to submit v1.00 of VirtualCunt.
Actually, there IS an app that translates grammatically-correct English into Sarah Palin-speak...
With the rise of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Microsoft ceased furthering the development of "free" (gratis) programming languages which came BUNDLED with the computer. Microsoft could have BUNDLED Visual Basic, and therefore empower their users the way that Commodore and Atari and even Apple (via Hypercard) tried to do... but instead Microsoft gambled it all on creating a *dependant* consumer class of users. That's why there was never a community of Windows users loyally subscribing to computer education magazines, and typing in program listings (the best way to learn programming). As soon as Windows became #1, all of these educational methods died.
Today most computer users do not know anything about computers. They just know rote clicks which is knowledge with a short shelf life... only until the next version of said Windows product (go into any used bookstore and check out the pricing on say a 3 year old used book for UNIX/Linux and one for Windows... the Windows book is usually under $1 because Vb6 knowledge was made worthless... while a book on Python 2.5 or PHP 5.0 still has loads of value). It's no surprise that some of the best programmers started out on these old 8 and 16 bit systems, and they're better not because these platforms were superior to today's.. no they're better because they were exposed to problem solving an an earlier age. That does not happen today.
I missed the days when PC's came with multiple programming languages for free... then I found Linux, and I realized it wasn't true that these things went away... only that Microsoft wasn't interested in hooking young kids on programming the way Atari, BBC, Apple and Commodore wanted to do (and did so well, for the time they were relevent)
Linux has no KNOWN EoP vulnerabilities at the moment, while Windows does.
You are just one of those "Well if Linux were more popular it would be less secure" types.. that validates your choice, but it's not true that FireFox and your email client would suddenly start running as root and auto-chmod 777 on everything you download.
When an EoP IS discovered on Linux, it is quickly patched... and this will really piss you off.. the bug is fixed WITHOUT first doing a cost/benefit study the way Microsoft operates.
On Windows, Microsoft can take their time, and even threaten researchers with a Cease and Desist.
It took a lot of work for Microsoft to get IE to run as something other than the current user context... unfortunately this is all an AFTERTHOUGHT.. Windows wasn't designed to run in user process sandboxes, so when they bolt these things onto an app, it is only a matter of time before a weakness is found.
Wrong - you are ignorant on this topic. Otherwise, please explain EXACTLY how an unprivileged user goes about installing malware.
They don't have rights to do anything "stupid"...
That's a strawman argument.
It's natural for security minded folks to "jab" at Microsoft (in a manner similar to how safety advocates "jab" at lead-painted Chinese toys).
On a SANE OS, rootkits can't be installed by regular users who are viewing a banner ad, or plugging in a storage device like a memory stick or USB picture frame.
Fake is a broad definition but simple to describe: it's unauthorized and unsupported by Cisco.
Trying to determine if the fakes are "0% accurate" or "50% accurate" is not really possible, given all the small parts and encrypted firmware, etc. It's counterfit.
That's not the case.
It's not like memory dumps don't ever get dumped there if you had an OS crash, and it's not like memory dumps would ever contain user data like user passwords. There's user data in there. Where does the REGISTRY get saved???
This is BAD.
You're confusing OS with "releases".
I have a system running Debian here, the installation is 12 years old. I installed it once from CD I bought 12 years ago (CheapBytes ).
I continue to get modern support.
I expect you to argue "but you DID have to upgrade the OS", but the point is artifical and moot.
"Upgrades" on Linux are just like "updates", except bundled together.
Doesn't really matter if you get your security updates from an "update" or an "upgrade", so long as you get it.
You have free "new versions" of software for LIFE on Linux.
Nobody holds onto old versions of Linux because they pirated an install key that doesn't work anymore on new versions, or crap like that which is part of the norm.
You don't have to like Linux, but your argument here is a bit "loaded" and in a context that has no meaning in Linux.
>Nobody ships with all of the W3C published recommendations. That's just stupid. You can't hit a moving target like that.
No no no no... red herring... you've been misled.
A browser does NOT need to support all W3C recommendations.
This is true for all browsers, even for IE.
What all browsers are EXPECTED to do is - "if" they support a recommendation - that they do what the recommendation SPECIFIES.
In other words, you choose to a CSS attribute CORRECT.. or do it NOT AT ALL. IE would randomly do something *undefined* instead of nothing.
Web developers literally spent YEARS reverse-engineering the exact behavior of Microsoft's undocumented standard. Had Microsoft not done anything at all with certain elements, the behavior would be quickly understood.
I'll give you an example: IE 6 and 7 would recognize many attributes for CSS padding and margins. IE would certainly do something with these attributes... but what they did was the OPPOSITE of the specs in some cases. Not only that, but the inheritance rules were not consistent. You literally had to write 2X the CSS code if you wanted your web-standards code to work on IE6.
This worked well for Microsoft - they essentially killed all progress on the web for a DECADE. Companies who locked themselves into IE6-based intranets did not care because there was no FireFox and no basis for Microsoft to put out new browser technology. MS wanted people to give up on HTML and just write everything in .NET. This is a holdover from the Microsoft "Blackbird" project, which seriously wanted to replace web HTML with compiled binary Microsoft-patented markup. Bill Gate's emails in the trial said he didn't want their bugs fixed if they were only causing problems in non-Microsoft browsers.
When a browser does not support an effect, you can easily workaround it. For example, if I couldn't assign a yellow background to an link, I could easily change course and wrap the A in a DIV and assign the style there instead. But what if the link color ceased to be yellow whenever that DIV was positioned with absolute instead of relative? What if the link disappeared whenever the DIV was inside a BODY tag which had a CSS background attribute?
It's the *random* nature of MSIE bugs (and the arrogance of not fixing them) that made web developers the most vocal critics of Microsoft.
if FireFox versions have issues with following the standard wrong, that gets fixed but it also is published what versions had that bug. So it's easy to design around without self-doubting your markup and CSS. You still can't go to the Microsoft website and get a solid definition of their CSS Box Model bugs.
So, what percentage of W3 that gets implemented is not ever an issue; it's the quality and the truthfulness of the implementation.
OK, so is your point that you want OTHER nations to stop advancing, just because you want them to?
I've never met a "less government libertarian" who didn't ALSO have a boatload of their 401 invested in countries who benefit from the very same policies they object to at home. Which makes me wonder... if it were less tax-favorable to invest outside the USA, would conservative-leaning Americans suddenly be FOR public healthcare and public education (the useful kind, not high school)? I think the answer is yes.
And if you think tax dollar giveaways to healthcare are LESS under the current system, you're not paying attention. The status of the US healthcare even forbids Medicare - BY LAW - from negotiating pharmaceutical prices... something all the private insurers can -and- do.
In an age of fast moving populations, diseases, and bio-terrorism it's pretty "pound foolish" for a nation not even offer free _preventative_ healthcare and checkups.
And I know someone who personally suffered because an insurance company got between the patient and their doctor...
Wait... the President should be walled off from the public, safe within his bubble of Washington advisors... and if too many of the unwashed masses make contact with him, he will gain dictatorial powers??
I get that you're trying to say that the public should not be able to micro-manage it's government. Totally understandable.
But given the abuse of the fillibuster in Congress, it takes a disaster (natural or man-made) to get the Government to do anything.
Also, remember, the LAST President could not even USE a computer never mind social media, and "the Decider" did have and use dictatorial powers to strip other Americans of their Constitutional rights, without trial. I wouldn't so quickly connect the two things.