She fails to give a good solid definitial of what "virus code" is, and I've got a funny feeling she'd like to stop security experts from posting code to web sites that outline various security exploits. I mean, that's all most viruses/worms are, a security exploit tied to replication code and in the case of virii detrimental code.
Let's take a look at some of this sillness:
How a virus replicates isn't hard to understand; in fact it's fairly common knowledge among researchers. We don't need to see the replication mechanism to figure out what makes viruses "work." The argument doesn't hold up once you understand that viruses are, for the most part, trivial programming exercises.
Really, just trivial programming exercises? Then why do so many of them fail? And what about the exploit they are using? How are people susposed to write solid, secure programs if they can't look at applications that exploint weaknesses in exisiting code? I don't know about you, but I think looking at how viruses work is a great tool for new programmers to understand security weaknesses and figure out ways to keep such flaws from occuring in their software.
While some voices have argued for a stronger legal remedy, research I've conducted over the last decade (at www.badguys.org/papers.htm) has shown that fear of the law isn't a major deterrent for many virus writers.
This is the smartest thing she says. More laws are not the answer. Virus writers don't care about the law. Virii are created from the ground up to create to cause intentional harm by people who don't care about the law.
Wishful thinking. These AOL users will still have Internet Explorer on their machines. A good majority of them will just change their AOL options to use IE instead of Netscape once they upgrade to a version that defaults to Netscape. They may not be completely computer literate, but they aren't morons...
I think you are overestimating AOL users. The majority of AOL users use AOL because they don't know how to work a computer. That's AOL's big selling point, that they don't have to think.
At any rate, neither DHTML nor CSS are IE specific features, so you have no idea what you're talking about to begin with..How did your post get moderated up?
How did your post get modded up? IE uses proprietary tags not found in the WC3 standards to implement "features" exclusive to IE. Many web sites use these tags that only work in IE.
This has been going on since the earliest days of web browsers, and in the past both IE and Netscape were just as guilty of inventing proprietary tags to give their browser more "features". That is what is so great about Mozilla, it is the most standards compliant web browser available. Now developers can code to the WC3 standards and know there is a browser capable of displaying the page correctly. Once (if) AOL converts their users to Mozilla it will hopefully force MS to make IE more standards compliant and in return allow developers to finally be able to easily design browser agnostic web sites.
Obviously you don't have much experience dealing with either end users or web page design issues.
Does anyone remember Amiga Power? That magazine had the best reviews of any magazine I'd ever read for any platform. They had no problem ripping a game a new one if it deserved it. They also had a great feature where each editor rated every game in the issue and would put their comments. Some were absolutely hilarious. Great reviews and a great British sense of humor. I wish they still made magazines like that. When I was in the UK a couple years back I checked our the various PC game mags, but couldn't find anything as funny or insightful as Amiga Power.
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She fails to give a good solid definitial of what "virus code" is, and I've got a funny feeling she'd like to stop security experts from posting code to web sites that outline various security exploits. I mean, that's all most viruses/worms are, a security exploit tied to replication code and in the case of virii detrimental code.
Let's take a look at some of this sillness:
Really, just trivial programming exercises? Then why do so many of them fail? And what about the exploit they are using? How are people susposed to write solid, secure programs if they can't look at applications that exploint weaknesses in exisiting code? I don't know about you, but I think looking at how viruses work is a great tool for new programmers to understand security weaknesses and figure out ways to keep such flaws from occuring in their software.
This is the smartest thing she says. More laws are not the answer. Virus writers don't care about the law. Virii are created from the ground up to create to cause intentional harm by people who don't care about the law.
Wishful thinking. These AOL users will still have Internet Explorer on their machines. A good majority of them will just change their AOL options to use IE instead of Netscape once they upgrade to a version that defaults to Netscape. They may not be completely computer literate, but they aren't morons...
I think you are overestimating AOL users. The majority of AOL users use AOL because they don't know how to work a computer. That's AOL's big selling point, that they don't have to think.
At any rate, neither DHTML nor CSS are IE specific features, so you have no idea what you're talking about to begin with..How did your post get moderated up?
How did your post get modded up? IE uses proprietary tags not found in the WC3 standards to implement "features" exclusive to IE. Many web sites use these tags that only work in IE.
This has been going on since the earliest days of web browsers, and in the past both IE and Netscape were just as guilty of inventing proprietary tags to give their browser more "features". That is what is so great about Mozilla, it is the most standards compliant web browser available. Now developers can code to the WC3 standards and know there is a browser capable of displaying the page correctly. Once (if) AOL converts their users to Mozilla it will hopefully force MS to make IE more standards compliant and in return allow developers to finally be able to easily design browser agnostic web sites.
Obviously you don't have much experience dealing with either end users or web page design issues.
Does anyone remember Amiga Power? That magazine had the best reviews of any magazine I'd ever read for any platform. They had no problem ripping a game a new one if it deserved it. They also had a great feature where each editor rated every game in the issue and would put their comments. Some were absolutely hilarious. Great reviews and a great British sense of humor. I wish they still made magazines like that. When I was in the UK a couple years back I checked our the various PC game mags, but couldn't find anything as funny or insightful as Amiga Power.