I've noticed the same thing, but on a historical basis, too. For years, the "Anti-virus" people have predicted plagues of unix or linux viruses or worms. They've never happened, short of one or two outbreak s of Tom Duff's sh-script virus that someone types in and tries out.
Worms (proper worms, ones that don't require clicking on a link in Outlook) seem to have worked the same way: they appeared on Unix (1988 Morris Worm), had a brief renaisssance in 2000-2001, and now worms only seem to plague Windows.
I think the reason for this is the same as the reason for almost any class of software migrating from unix to Windows: it's just plain easier to do programming in Unix. You can make a proof-of-concept without Win32 flaws or "NT native API" irregularities hosing you up. Once you've done it a few times (1i9n, Ramen, cheese, poisonbox, x.c, scalper, slapper) you've figured out the important concepts and you can move along to the really tricky to program for platform, Windows.
Well, a virus/worm that kills it's host too easily won't spread too far, will it?
What about the Witty worm? To quote from that link, Witty was the first widely propagated Internet worm to carry a destructive payload. The authors of the referenced study think that the Witty Worm infected the entire vulnerable population before it self-destructed by scragging hard disks.
If you invoke the "too" in "kills it's host too easily", then I'll just wave you off as tautological: there's no way to disprove what you've said, in that case.
all it really means is that the malcontents will have to work harder. You don't really expect them to give up, do you?
But "work harder" is all that any security measure calls for.
In "good neighborhoods" houses have glass windows. Doesn't take too much work to crack into those houses, now does it? Some fraction (much less than advertised by the lawn signs) have alarm systems. Those alarms can probably be circumvented, at the cost of more work. In worse neighborhoods, some of the windows on a given house tend to have bars. Not all windows, just some. In those neighborhoods, the "hard work" of walking around the house to a non-barred window is enough. I bad neighborhoods, every window might have bars. But I bet that most houses with barred windows have hollow-core does, or crappy locks.
I really don't expect "them" to give up, but I do expect that raising the energy barrier will constitute enough of a problem that worms won't reach epidemic proportion of hang around for MORE THAN TWO YEARS like Code Red and Nimda have.
The article quotes Bob Muglia: Moreover, forcing a company to diversify means reducing efficiency
As Frank Herbert wrote in The Dosadi Experiment, "eternal sloppiness is the price of freedom", ya big lug. Holy cow, reduced efficieny for the attacker is the point of diversity. Think about it: I'm getting hits from Code Red and Nimda Two Years after they were released, and during the first two or three cycles of Code Red, I got 20 hits a day. In comparison, I got maybe 20 hits total for Slapper, and they went away after a week. Microsoft and the anti-virus people need to realize that (as a whole) the Internet doesn't need absolute immunity from worms or viruses: we just need to have a large fraction of the population immune from any given virus or worm. We can tolerate 10% crappy, poorly-administered Windows boxes, but we can't tolerate 97% crappy, poorly-administered Windows boxes. Sobig.f should have proved that to everyone.
No data backing it up. Rely's upon, basically, 'I say so.'
What in the sam scratch are you talking about?
This buzzcut feller cites Pew Internet studies, stock quote data and links to other weblogs supporting his position.
Not every noun is hyperlinked, if that's what you mean. I will grant that buzzcut could have used a few more citations for items 1 (Games don't influence behavior) and 2 (Academics need to justify their interest in games). Buzzcut does say "study after study" for item (1), and if academics need to justify their interest, they do it with footnotes anyway.
Because, after all, it's critical of Linux, so it just can't be true. This is Slashdot, where only Windows is the True Evil and every Linux is perfect and holy in every way.
No, I'm sorry! Thank you for playing, what do we have for the Straw Man, Johnny?
The facts of the matter involve mi2g being a documented doomsayer-that-never-actually happens, and Microsoft being a company that keeps getting caught shilling and astroturfing, or just plain faking it, like the fake "switch" ad.
Microsoft has funded many "benchmarks" and "white papers" or "studies" in the past - honestly, we have to consider the mi2g report just another piece of astroturf, until proven otherwise.
I'm sorry if I'm making you feel like I'm suspicious of you personally, but I am. MSFT's shilling record means that every pro-MSFT opinion is pretty much guilty until proven innocent - if you lie down with pigs, you can't expect to get up smelling like a rose, as Dave Barry once said.
Gotta consider the source of this study: mi2g. They haven't been totally reliable in the past, and mi2g seems to be more interested in generating press rather than doing anything.
Of course, nobody in The Media will consider the source: the sound bite is just too good.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that your car can do a burnout that will rotate a manhole cover?
No, I don't habitually drive a cement truck around. But other people do.
The point is, that every design decision involves consideration of a lot of factors, some of which are binary ("The cover shall possess a shape to prevent dropping it down the hole") and some of them involve actual mechanical intuition and caculation. Since a lot of manhole covers do have a circular shape, the loss-of-traction consideration must either work out like you say, or other factors override it.
Don't kid yourself. If I'd listed "gratuitious, monomaniacal managment driven incompatibilities with all other manufacturer's manholes", then you might see me in Redmond. In a suit.
Manhole Covers are round so they can't fall down the manhole.
This particular answer always bothers me. Sure, it's simplistically true, but a whole family of shapes exists that has the same property but does not have the unfortunate property of spinning in place. For example, assume a vehicle stops on a manhole cover with a (powered) tire off-center on the cover. When the driver presses the throttle, the tire exerts a force on the manhole cover that gives it a tendency to rotate. Instant loss of traction.
Also, other shaped covers could posses a flange - the manhole would have a smaller maximum dimension than the flange, preventing the cover from falling down the hole. Squares or triangles would require unreasonably large flanges, but octagons wouldn't.
My guess is that a variety of factors (shape of manholes, ease of manufature, ability to roll the covers) lead to round manhole covers.
Are you claiming the Linux community never does anything like this?
What do you mean? Am I claiming that Linus Torvalds (or whoever you imagine to direct "the linux community", the Linux analog of Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer) directs his employees to participate in public forums to post derogatory comments about MSFT products at his expense? No, I'm not claiming that.
You missed the point of my observation that a corporate entity (MSFT) conducts organized campaigns of misleading the public by hiding the origin of the "public opinion poll" or "grass roots campaign" or "think tank whitepaper".
Sure, the linux community does all of the things that MSFT does - but on an individual-by-individual basis. I've posted pro-linux articles in public forums. I've written anti-MSFT
whitepapers. But I've done it by myself, on my own time, I wasn't paid for it, I haven't claimed to be someone else, I didn't copy any PR firm's talking points, and I haven't claimed any kind of authority based on lack of bias, as the Gartner and Alexis de Toqueville whitepapers claim.
That's the real point of my laundry list of shilling and astroturfing. MSFT, directed by upper management, puts out all kind of pro-MSFT material, whose origins are deliberately obscured. By pretending to come from Joe Sixpack or from think tanks, MSFT progaganda gains a mantle of legitimacy that it wouldn't possess if it openly acknowledged its origins.
I'm sure there's more, that's just all I can scrounge up in a few minutes. I seem to remember another MSFT-funded think-tank ("Indepence Institute"?) white paper, and there was an interesting "Brill's Content" article on how MSFT tracks reporters and what they write about MSFT. Actually, isn't the above enough? 10 items from 9 different sources about all varieties of shilling and astroturfing in forums from small to nation-wide. Yes, I think it's prudent to believe that MSFT employees watch Slashdot and mod-up pro-MSFT articles, or even submit them.
I'd go so far as to say that the average person should be suspicious of any pro-MSFT article or viewpoint posted in a public forum. If you, the reader, are pro-MSFT, I'm sorry: if you lie down with pigs, you can't expect to wake up in the morning smelling like roses.
Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle, BTW, you're both black.
Hey I provided references. Mr FUD-Kettle did not. Go read what the references say then get back to us. When you do get back to us let us know what you've found out - post the URLs. Until then buh bye.
Even then administring linux is not as simple as windows.
How do you figure? We've all encountered the fact that MSFT products just aren't documented or the documentation is inadequate or just plain wrong. We've all encountered mysterious Blue Screens of Death. We've all encountered Windows 95 and 98 machines that are dying of cruft buildup. We've all encountered "magic" GUI applications that don't have a command line counterpart. We've all encountered installs that require reboots (I had to reboot my Win2K box just to upgrade AIM recently). Just reasoning from first principles, I can say that administering an number of Linux machines will be easier than administering the same number of Windows machines - the admin won't have to physically show up at a linux machine unless something is really wrong with it.
Very honestly, I think that administering a number of Linux machines (number greater than 5) will end up easier and cheaper than the same number of Windows machines.
I'd love to see some "plain economics" rebutting this. As near as I can tell, real information that exists contradicts your position:
I had a look at the "Darknet" paper written by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman all of Microsoft Corporation.
It's really strange. Some aspects of it seem to pander very crudely to the MSFT bias towards single-user computers - the authors miss out on usenet as a "darknet" completely and they date "Internet" darknet activities to 1998. I can recall FTP'ing scanned playboy centerfolds from wustl.edu as early as 1989 - it was almost a year to the day after the Morris internet worm struck. At the same time the conclusions are very anti-MSFT-corporate-worldview: the authors conclude that some form of "darknet" will always exist for various reasons. This collides directly with MSFT's TCPA and Palladium and general piracy-crackdown viewpoint.
I can only conclude that some faction inside MSFT doesn't like or believe in the MSFT-corporate direction to include copy protection (a.k.a. DRM) in the OS and this paper is a sort of sermon in the void to warn the CEO/COO/C?? against putting all the MSFT eggs in one basket.
Or perhaps the authors are trying to run the plot of their latest cyber-thriller up the flagpole to see who salutes it.
but does anyone honestly think Symantec would be tarnishing the Symantec and Norton brands that have taken so long to build?
No, honestly, I don't think that Symantec would tarnish the brands unless management thought that the additional income from spamming was worth more than the damage to the brand name.
Managers and marketeers went to business school, for crying out loud. Managers and marketeers thing that everything is negotiable. Someone might have gotten a Bright Idea that setting up a double-blind front to spam might make a bunch of extra money, a la MSFT's turning a blind eye towards piracy in China.
As regularly gets pointed on here on Slashdot, a corporation's purpose is to make money for its shareholders. If that involves putting the torch to a brand name that consumers hold in high regard, the corporation's officers are obliged to do it.
I think in the long run, mainline companies that spam will end up regretting spamming. But that's in the long run. Anyone remember AGIS Networks? Gone and not missed, but it took a long
time and it took hosting Sanford Wallace to do it.
I'm certain that whatever motives ROC government had in requesting Windows source code from MSFT are far from pure. However, given the NSA_KEY episode and the existance of things like ECHELON,
I have to believe that any foreign government has to suspect US government spyware might be in Windows.
If the government of ROC doesn't at least think about the possibility of TLA agency spyware or trojans in such a massive closed-source OS, they aren't being paranoid enough.
That Joel! Always coming up with catchy phrases for concepts that his betters have already published papers on. See David Keppel's
1993 paper for a more thorough explanation, complete with lack of baby-talk.
"Server products are so complex, (simultaneous installation) may not always work out the way people hope," Silver said. "Maybe Microsoft has come to that realization, too."
I really like how C|Net only quotes an analyst who has something positive to say.
This is utterly bizarre - only MSFT can get away with cancelling a major release and not undergoing a hailstorm of criticism in the trade press. Things haven't changed in the computer trade press since at least 1992, when MSFT released a particularly weak, non-standards-compliant, single-CPU-architecture operating system called "NT" without a network-transparent window system, No other company could have gotten away with that in 1992, but the trade press kissed up on MSFT back then, just like they do now.
Spam is theft, plain and simple. Spammers need to be punished.
You know who else needs to be punished? Mainline companies like Symantec who hire obvious fly-by-night spammers to slosh crap ads for Noron SystemWorks all over email, and then deny that Norton has anything to do with it.
About twice a week for the last 6 or 8 months I get the same ad from some theiving yellowbellies. I used to send the ads to piracy@symantec.com. After 10 increasingly strident emails, the neanderthal Symantec hired to insult people who write to piracy@symantec.com finally wrote me back, using both fingers, only to deny the obvious connections between Symantec and the spammers. Hey, unibrow! Do you think I was born yesterday?
I have sworn NEVER to buy a Symantec product because of this spamming.
Well, I also use Linux and NetBSD so it's very unlikely I will ever need Symantec's to fix up a crap Windows installation, but still, I've taken the oath.
BTW, due process applies if you fall under the protection of the U.S. Constitution. People who are at war with the U.S. (including U.S. citizens who go over to the other side) aren't entitled to it.
Oh, I'm sorry - I must have missed it when Congress declared war. Can somebody point me to a web page with that on it?
The point of due process (which might include declarations of war in some sense) is to clearly delineate "the other side", who's acting legally, and who's acting illegally. Having some progam written by contractors at the Pentagon decide that the writer of some text is a "terrorist" based on statistics or bayesian probabilities is pretty much stripping all of us, US citizens included, of "due process".
A terrorist is one who engages in terrorism. Terrorism involves the intentional targeting of noncombatants, for the purpose of inciting terror. It doesn't matter what the cause....
Various Palestinian groups are engaged in terrorism. They may *also* be freedom fighters, but that is irrelevant. They are terrorists.
That's a nice, pure ideology there. Thank you for pointing that out. I should have been less rhetorical. Let me try again.
Clearly the Pentagon will have to define "terrorist" in some machine-understandable fashion. The Pentagon programmers might use key-word recognition, they might use Bayesian statistical analysis. We just don't know.
Since we're talking about a massive data-mining application, the application doesn't have the luxury of executing a stored procedure that can actually determine whether the writer of a particular piece of text intentionally targetted noncombatants for the purpose of inciting terror. The application only has massive piles of text to sieve through. I don't think I've made any statements up to this point that a rational human can disagree with.
The current US government has made it clear that (Jose Padilla) it's not going to take the rights of citizens, much less the rights of non-citizens (Predator attack in Yemen) too seriously in it's War Against Terrorism.
Therefore, one of the issues that every human must be concerned about having the Pentagon mine all the data in the US to find "terrorists" is what criteria the Pentagon applies to data to decide "terrorist" or "not-terrorist". Who gets to make the decision about what key-words or statistics or algorthmic value make the writer a "terrorist"? What oversight is there of the decision or criteria?
I think that's a less relativist way to ask the question.
Slashdot Mirror
I will not accept DRM any more than I will sit through a presentation where someone reads their PowerPoint slides to me.
DRM gives someone else control over the gateway to information.
He who would deny you access to data thinks himself your better.
I've noticed the same thing, but on a historical basis, too. For years, the "Anti-virus" people have predicted plagues of unix or linux viruses or worms. They've never happened, short of one or two outbreak s of Tom Duff's sh-script virus that someone types in and tries out. Worms (proper worms, ones that don't require clicking on a link in Outlook) seem to have worked the same way: they appeared on Unix (1988 Morris Worm), had a brief renaisssance in 2000-2001, and now worms only seem to plague Windows. I think the reason for this is the same as the reason for almost any class of software migrating from unix to Windows: it's just plain easier to do programming in Unix. You can make a proof-of-concept without Win32 flaws or "NT native API" irregularities hosing you up. Once you've done it a few times (1i9n, Ramen, cheese, poisonbox, x.c, scalper, slapper) you've figured out the important concepts and you can move along to the really tricky to program for platform, Windows.
You forgot to mention that "sasser" only infects windows machines. As usual, Linux and Macs and others are immune.
What does this tell us about MSFT products?
What about the Witty worm? To quote from that link, Witty was the first widely propagated Internet worm to carry a destructive payload. The authors of the referenced study think that the Witty Worm infected the entire vulnerable population before it self-destructed by scragging hard disks.
If you invoke the "too" in "kills it's host too easily", then I'll just wave you off as tautological: there's no way to disprove what you've said, in that case.
But "work harder" is all that any security measure calls for.
In "good neighborhoods" houses have glass windows. Doesn't take too much work to crack into those houses, now does it? Some fraction (much less than advertised by the lawn signs) have alarm systems. Those alarms can probably be circumvented, at the cost of more work. In worse neighborhoods, some of the windows on a given house tend to have bars. Not all windows, just some. In those neighborhoods, the "hard work" of walking around the house to a non-barred window is enough. I bad neighborhoods, every window might have bars. But I bet that most houses with barred windows have hollow-core does, or crappy locks.
I really don't expect "them" to give up, but I do expect that raising the energy barrier will constitute enough of a problem that worms won't reach epidemic proportion of hang around for MORE THAN TWO YEARS like Code Red and Nimda have.
The article quotes Bob Muglia: Moreover, forcing a company to diversify means reducing efficiency
As Frank Herbert wrote in The Dosadi Experiment, "eternal sloppiness is the price of freedom", ya big lug. Holy cow, reduced efficieny for the attacker is the point of diversity. Think about it: I'm getting hits from Code Red and Nimda Two Years after they were released, and during the first two or three cycles of Code Red, I got 20 hits a day. In comparison, I got maybe 20 hits total for Slapper, and they went away after a week. Microsoft and the anti-virus people need to realize that (as a whole) the Internet doesn't need absolute immunity from worms or viruses: we just need to have a large fraction of the population immune from any given virus or worm. We can tolerate 10% crappy, poorly-administered Windows boxes, but we can't tolerate 97% crappy, poorly-administered Windows boxes. Sobig.f should have proved that to everyone.
What in the sam scratch are you talking about?
This buzzcut feller cites Pew Internet studies, stock quote data and links to other weblogs supporting his position.
Not every noun is hyperlinked, if that's what you mean. I will grant that buzzcut could have used a few more citations for items 1 (Games don't influence behavior) and 2 (Academics need to justify their interest in games). Buzzcut does say "study after study" for item (1), and if academics need to justify their interest, they do it with footnotes anyway.
Because, after all, it's critical of Linux, so it just can't be true. This is Slashdot, where only Windows is the True Evil and every Linux is perfect and holy in every way.
No, I'm sorry! Thank you for playing, what do we have for the Straw Man, Johnny?
The facts of the matter involve mi2g being a documented doomsayer-that-never-actually happens, and Microsoft being a company that keeps getting caught shilling and astroturfing, or just plain faking it, like the fake "switch" ad.
Microsoft has funded many "benchmarks" and "white papers" or "studies" in the past - honestly, we have to consider the mi2g report just another piece of astroturf, until proven otherwise.
I'm sorry if I'm making you feel like I'm suspicious of you personally, but I am. MSFT's shilling record means that every pro-MSFT opinion is pretty much guilty until proven innocent - if you lie down with pigs, you can't expect to get up smelling like a rose, as Dave Barry once said.
Gotta consider the source of this study: mi2g. They haven't been totally reliable in the past, and mi2g seems to be more interested in generating press rather than doing anything.
Of course, nobody in The Media will consider the source: the sound bite is just too good.
No, I don't habitually drive a cement truck around. But other people do.
The point is, that every design decision involves consideration of a lot of factors, some of which are binary ("The cover shall possess a shape to prevent dropping it down the hole") and some of them involve actual mechanical intuition and caculation. Since a lot of manhole covers do have a circular shape, the loss-of-traction consideration must either work out like you say, or other factors override it.
Don't kid yourself. If I'd listed "gratuitious, monomaniacal managment driven incompatibilities with all other manufacturer's manholes", then you might see me in Redmond. In a suit.
This particular answer always bothers me. Sure, it's simplistically true, but a whole family of shapes exists that has the same property but does not have the unfortunate property of spinning in place. For example, assume a vehicle stops on a manhole cover with a (powered) tire off-center on the cover. When the driver presses the throttle, the tire exerts a force on the manhole cover that gives it a tendency to rotate. Instant loss of traction.
Also, other shaped covers could posses a flange - the manhole would have a smaller maximum dimension than the flange, preventing the cover from falling down the hole. Squares or triangles would require unreasonably large flanges, but octagons wouldn't.
My guess is that a variety of factors (shape of manholes, ease of manufature, ability to roll the covers) lead to round manhole covers.
What do you mean? Am I claiming that Linus Torvalds (or whoever you imagine to direct "the linux community", the Linux analog of Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer) directs his employees to participate in public forums to post derogatory comments about MSFT products at his expense? No, I'm not claiming that.
You missed the point of my observation that a corporate entity (MSFT) conducts organized campaigns of misleading the public by hiding the origin of the "public opinion poll" or "grass roots campaign" or "think tank whitepaper".
Sure, the linux community does all of the things that MSFT does - but on an individual-by-individual basis. I've posted pro-linux articles in public forums. I've written anti-MSFT whitepapers. But I've done it by myself, on my own time, I wasn't paid for it, I haven't claimed to be someone else, I didn't copy any PR firm's talking points, and I haven't claimed any kind of authority based on lack of bias, as the Gartner and Alexis de Toqueville whitepapers claim.
That's the real point of my laundry list of shilling and astroturfing. MSFT, directed by upper management, puts out all kind of pro-MSFT material, whose origins are deliberately obscured. By pretending to come from Joe Sixpack or from think tanks, MSFT progaganda gains a mantle of legitimacy that it wouldn't possess if it openly acknowledged its origins.
Actually, yes. MSFT has an amazing history of shilling and astroturfing:
I'm sure there's more, that's just all I can scrounge up in a few minutes. I seem to remember another MSFT-funded think-tank ("Indepence Institute"?) white paper, and there was an interesting "Brill's Content" article on how MSFT tracks reporters and what they write about MSFT. Actually, isn't the above enough? 10 items from 9 different sources about all varieties of shilling and astroturfing in forums from small to nation-wide. Yes, I think it's prudent to believe that MSFT employees watch Slashdot and mod-up pro-MSFT articles, or even submit them.
I'd go so far as to say that the average person should be suspicious of any pro-MSFT article or viewpoint posted in a public forum. If you, the reader, are pro-MSFT, I'm sorry: if you lie down with pigs, you can't expect to wake up in the morning smelling like roses.
No, that isn't the reason. MSFT is a convicted monopolist, remember? They have the best selling software because they illegally maintained a monopoly.
I think this fact needs to be remembered in a lot of circles. You can't just blame Wag-Edd and MSFT Marketeers any more.
Hey I provided references. Mr FUD-Kettle did not. Go read what the references say then get back to us. When you do get back to us let us know what you've found out - post the URLs. Until then buh bye.
Sincerely
Blackpot W. References
How do you figure? We've all encountered the fact that MSFT products just aren't documented or the documentation is inadequate or just plain wrong. We've all encountered mysterious Blue Screens of Death. We've all encountered Windows 95 and 98 machines that are dying of cruft buildup. We've all encountered "magic" GUI applications that don't have a command line counterpart. We've all encountered installs that require reboots (I had to reboot my Win2K box just to upgrade AIM recently). Just reasoning from first principles, I can say that administering an number of Linux machines will be easier than administering the same number of Windows machines - the admin won't have to physically show up at a linux machine unless something is really wrong with it.
Very honestly, I think that administering a number of Linux machines (number greater than 5) will end up easier and cheaper than the same number of Windows machines.
I'd love to see some "plain economics" rebutting this. As near as I can tell, real information that exists contradicts your position:
I'm calling "FUD" on your position.
I had a look at the "Darknet" paper written by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman all of Microsoft Corporation.
It's really strange. Some aspects of it seem to pander very crudely to the MSFT bias towards single-user computers - the authors miss out on usenet as a "darknet" completely and they date "Internet" darknet activities to 1998. I can recall FTP'ing scanned playboy centerfolds from wustl.edu as early as 1989 - it was almost a year to the day after the Morris internet worm struck. At the same time the conclusions are very anti-MSFT-corporate-worldview: the authors conclude that some form of "darknet" will always exist for various reasons. This collides directly with MSFT's TCPA and Palladium and general piracy-crackdown viewpoint.
I can only conclude that some faction inside MSFT doesn't like or believe in the MSFT-corporate direction to include copy protection (a.k.a. DRM) in the OS and this paper is a sort of sermon in the void to warn the CEO/COO/C?? against putting all the MSFT eggs in one basket.
Or perhaps the authors are trying to run the plot of their latest cyber-thriller up the flagpole to see who salutes it.
No, honestly, I don't think that Symantec would tarnish the brands unless management thought that the additional income from spamming was worth more than the damage to the brand name.
Managers and marketeers went to business school, for crying out loud. Managers and marketeers thing that everything is negotiable. Someone might have gotten a Bright Idea that setting up a double-blind front to spam might make a bunch of extra money, a la MSFT's turning a blind eye towards piracy in China.
As regularly gets pointed on here on Slashdot, a corporation's purpose is to make money for its shareholders. If that involves putting the torch to a brand name that consumers hold in high regard, the corporation's officers are obliged to do it.
I think in the long run, mainline companies that spam will end up regretting spamming. But that's in the long run. Anyone remember AGIS Networks? Gone and not missed, but it took a long time and it took hosting Sanford Wallace to do it.
I'm certain that whatever motives ROC government had in requesting Windows source code from MSFT are far from pure. However, given the NSA_KEY episode and the existance of things like ECHELON, I have to believe that any foreign government has to suspect US government spyware might be in Windows.
If the government of ROC doesn't at least think about the possibility of TLA agency spyware or trojans in such a massive closed-source OS, they aren't being paranoid enough.
That Joel! Always coming up with catchy phrases for concepts that his betters have already published papers on. See David Keppel's 1993 paper for a more thorough explanation, complete with lack of baby-talk.
Quote from the article:
I really like how C|Net only quotes an analyst who has something positive to say.
This is utterly bizarre - only MSFT can get away with cancelling a major release and not undergoing a hailstorm of criticism in the trade press. Things haven't changed in the computer trade press since at least 1992, when MSFT released a particularly weak, non-standards-compliant, single-CPU-architecture operating system called "NT" without a network-transparent window system, No other company could have gotten away with that in 1992, but the trade press kissed up on MSFT back then, just like they do now.
Spam is theft, plain and simple. Spammers need to be punished.
You know who else needs to be punished? Mainline companies like Symantec who hire obvious fly-by-night spammers to slosh crap ads for Noron SystemWorks all over email, and then deny that Norton has anything to do with it.
About twice a week for the last 6 or 8 months I get the same ad from some theiving yellowbellies. I used to send the ads to piracy@symantec.com. After 10 increasingly strident emails, the neanderthal Symantec hired to insult people who write to piracy@symantec.com finally wrote me back, using both fingers, only to deny the obvious connections between Symantec and the spammers. Hey, unibrow! Do you think I was born yesterday?
I have sworn NEVER to buy a Symantec product because of this spamming.
Well, I also use Linux and NetBSD so it's very unlikely I will ever need Symantec's to fix up a crap Windows installation, but still, I've taken the oath.
Oh, I'm sorry - I must have missed it when Congress declared war. Can somebody point me to a web page with that on it?
The point of due process (which might include declarations of war in some sense) is to clearly delineate "the other side", who's acting legally, and who's acting illegally. Having some progam written by contractors at the Pentagon decide that the writer of some text is a "terrorist" based on statistics or bayesian probabilities is pretty much stripping all of us, US citizens included, of "due process".
That's a nice, pure ideology there. Thank you for pointing that out. I should have been less rhetorical. Let me try again.
Clearly the Pentagon will have to define "terrorist" in some machine-understandable fashion. The Pentagon programmers might use key-word recognition, they might use Bayesian statistical analysis. We just don't know.
Since we're talking about a massive data-mining application, the application doesn't have the luxury of executing a stored procedure that can actually determine whether the writer of a particular piece of text intentionally targetted noncombatants for the purpose of inciting terror. The application only has massive piles of text to sieve through. I don't think I've made any statements up to this point that a rational human can disagree with.
The current US government has made it clear that (Jose Padilla) it's not going to take the rights of citizens, much less the rights of non-citizens (Predator attack in Yemen) too seriously in it's War Against Terrorism.
Therefore, one of the issues that every human must be concerned about having the Pentagon mine all the data in the US to find "terrorists" is what criteria the Pentagon applies to data to decide "terrorist" or "not-terrorist". Who gets to make the decision about what key-words or statistics or algorthmic value make the writer a "terrorist"? What oversight is there of the decision or criteria?
I think that's a less relativist way to ask the question.