the world needs to be rid of terrorist and I applaud the Pentagon's efforts in this war against terrorism
There's more than one problem here. First,
who gets to define "terrorist"? One man's freedom figher is another man's terrorist. Find out what Reagan had to say about the Mujahadeen in the 80s, then think about what Bush said about the Taliban (one of the components of the Mujahadeen) in 2001.
Second "the Pentagon" is nominally prevented from law enforcement. If "the Pentagon" goes trawling for terrorists in the US civilian population a principle that has served the US very well goes by the wayside: the military and the navy get used against US citizens. The old USSR shows us the dangers of that path.
Thirdly, we risk a new McCarthyism: do we really want to reinstate guilt by association? There's an extra danger in what Poindexter proposes, too. Do we want the association made by buggy computer programs?
Fouth, we risk giving up an almost sacred principle, that of due process.
"It [is] more dangerous that even a guilty person should be
punished without the forms of law, than that he should escape."
I think eventually superior products and services will be widely adopted and MS will lose it's stranglehold on the industry. But until that happens,...
That's exactly the point of Judge Jackson ruling that MSFT performed illegal monopoly maintenance: MSFT squashes potential rivals and potentially superior products and services.
Read a little basic microeconomics. All but the most ideologically radical economists acknowledge that a free market is a good thing but that free markets aren't really that great at keeping free markets free.
for #1 it's going to depend on cost and quality. If Ozzy sounds better on the DVD-Audio,...
That might constitute a bad example. I think that record companies distributed Heavy Metal bands on vinyl far longer than any other genre because the improved quality of CDs just didn't make any discernable difference to either the listeners or to the music.
Let's face it: primarily the record companies moved us all to CDs to allow them to let slide their back catalog of LPs and secondarily because CD sound is better. I don't want to hear that the sound is better from any "audiophiles" either. Audiophiles are the same morons who bought distilled water from discWasher for $5 for 4 ounces and buy "directional" speaker cables today and who use a green magic marker on the rim of their CDs. And then claim to be able to hear phase-shift distortion in CD music.
I don't think the proposed system will work for every one. I think that most workers in development groups will end up getting spanked for what the system interprets as "misbehavior". A developer unit-testing pieces of an application may end up deleting large swaths of files to see how a routine responds to missing files. A developer may write a "dummy server" that just sends streams of random bytes to test how a client process responds to bad input data. Testers may have to reset dates on machines to verify leap year compliance. Testers may make a bunch of files read-only to see how an app handles a log file that has bad permissions.
These are all legit operations - I've done every single one as part of testing or unit-testing in the past. They're also all operations that might be part of a local or remote root exploit.
The Management will have to turn off the profiling for certain users to avoid periodically getting swamped with false alarms or cutting off testing during the final phases of product development.
over 80% of a sample group of Chinese computer users believed they had been infected with a virus
I'll believe in this belief. Years ago, maybe 1989 or 1990, I had a conversation with an engineer at then-major aerospace company Martin Marietta. He was no dummy, but he carried the misbelief that a computer virus was something that occurred naturally, like an influenza virus, or herpes.
In conjunction with the "if anything's wrong with my computer, it's a virus" phenomena you see every day amongst business types, an 80% belief rate isn't unlikely, even in the USA.
I blame the Anti-Virus industry at least partially for this. Members of the AV community are so tight-lipped about viruses that they end up being almost mystical. AV people seem to believe that any real information about a virus or worm will foster further virus and/or worm writing. So they don't give out any real information (like "Using Outlook will inevitably cause you to get infected. Switch to something else"). They even seem to have helped the trend of calling any malware a "virus" because of this.
What's your best guess on how Judge Kollar-Kotelly will rule? The Judge Jackson's ruling came as an utter and complete surprise to almost everyone who hadn't followed *web* reports on the trial. The mass media did a very bad job protraying the issues of the original trial, basically parroting MSFT and Wag-Edd's "freedom to innovate" press releases, rather than reporting on the fairly straightforward restraint of trade case that the DoJ made. This time around, the web reporters seemed a bit confused by how the case went as well.
Everything Don Norman writes about is so abstracted from the real world that I have to wonder when (or even if) he last sat down and wrote a program. Any program. Sure he's ideologically pure but like Bruce Tognazzini everything he advocates can't quite be backed up with research. It's just hot air.
C'mon - it's 2002. If you've got it flaunt it. Put some code or a peer-reviewed paper on the web for everyone to try out. If you don't have code have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.
Spam is theft? That conflicts with other typical liberterian arguments, such as "theft is depriving someone of property, therefore music/movie piracy isn't theft".
Yes, spam is theft. And thank you for the straw man.
I doubt that anyone who's thought about the music piracy issue for longer than 6 seconds takes the extremely simplistic position straw man summary you made. Media piracy is a copyright violation first, and maybe only. Yes, massive-scale copyright violations (think Taiwan) consitute theft, exactly the same way that sending 2 million people an ad they don't want is theft. Copying a few pages out of a book at the library isn't copyright violation, and it's not theft. Sorry, that's the way the courts have ruled.
And before you throw up another straw man, the objections most thoughtful people have to the DMCA or the P2P-hacking-bill or just about anything Jack Valenti says don't involve legalizing theft. The objections involve the balance between government granted monopolies (like copyright and patents) and the fair use by the governed citizens.
Advertising IS protected speech, just less protected.
Rubbish. Advertising has to be true (see various Truth in Advertising statutes) while other speech does not. Some things cannot be advertised: How long has it been since you've seen a cigarette ad on Tee Vee? You have absolutely no right to advertise anything, much less on my nickle, as spammers do.
Libertarians have never enjoyed theft. Since email spam is theft (advertising is NOT protected speech, and even it were protected, I wouldn't have to pay to hear it), spammers are thieves, mere common criminals, not first amendment martyrs.
Sure, make them pay. But then, chop them up into small pieces, put the pieces into gallon jugs of gasoline, set the gas on fire and throw the burning jugs into SF Bay on national tee vee.
Spammers have proven to be so stupid that only the most Flagrantly Over the Top Demonstration of Hatred will teach some of them a lesson.
That's right, spammers: you're all incoherent stumble-bums, whose ravings are not listened to in polite society. When we can legally kill you, we will.
US public schools don't have the purpose of giving out learning. You made a common mistake. US public schools have a couple of purposes: (1) producing factory workers (2) keeping 13-18 year olds out of the labor market.
I've yet to see an explanation (other than "It's Magic!") of how a Palladium/TCPA/Fritz-chipped computer will end up more secure against viruses and worms. For starters, note that the most prevalent viruses for the last several years have affected *macros*, and assume that the "worms" they talk about are things like Klez, SirCam and etc, basically Outlook viruses.
Certainly in a Fritzed Palladium computer, software like Word and Outlook will have "certification". I mean, MSFT will certify their own software, right? The Word macro virus
just gets interpreted by the certified Word executable. Similarly, Klez
would just cause the "certified" Outlook executable to do certain things.
Given that any computing system that is Turing-complete can support viruses, how does Palladium make a system resistant to them? Is a Palladium system just not Turing-complete? Will "certified" executables not have features like scripting languages, macros, etc built into them?
A technical solution is the ONLY solution to fixing SPAM
Only if you define "violence" as a technical solution. I feel that the masses must rise up and commit some obscenely violent form of punishment on a spammer or two, the more colorful and widely-reported, the better. The violence must be as graphic and horrific as possible, to deter the remaining, live, spammers.
But seriously folks, there is no technical solution. Spam is what it is because of intent, context and interpretation. Those are the qualities that technical solutions just can't determine by themselves.
Technical solutions won't work - we need a political or legal solution, before SMTP-based email breaks down, and MSFT steps in with a pay-per-message "MSMTP" protocol, where it costs at least $25,000 to run a server.
The European Space Agency has made available VHDL for a CPU that implements the SPARC V8 instruction set. The VHDL is available under the GNU LGPL license. Granted, implementations of LEON are slow (25 MHz?) but it's totally freely available. You may need to buy a $99 license from SPARC International to actually sell any CPUs you make, but that's pretty cheap.
The SPARC instruction set is pretty simple. I don't imagine that a similar effort for x86 CPUs would be as simple or as quick.
The telcos and cablemodem companies have never really liked to provide freewheeling internet access. The cable companies in particular have a "broadcast" mentality where someone pays to provide "content" and the unwashed massses pay to view the "content". Unfortunately for them, all the cool stuff requires two-way communications. A very unfortunate side effect of providing communication back from the "viewers" using TCP/IP is that the "viewers" can now do content themselves.
DSL and cablemodem people have an ugly history of AUPs that prevent running "servers". They have a history of blocking port 80 (and other ports) inbound to their clients.
There's two real problems inherent in this mess:
TCP/IP doesn't make too much distinction between "client" and "server" except in the 3-packet handshake when setting up a connection.
The traditional "content providers" (movie and TV studios, music recording industry) are totally bankrupt - morally, creatively and philosophically. When was the last time you saw a TV show that didn't copy some format pioneered in the 50s?
So what does this predict for the future? A couple of things: first, MPAA and RIAA and whatever the TV and radio trade associations are will continue to try to legislate things, since they no longer have the mental or moral wherewithal to make any new art. Expect DMCA enforcement to continue to get worse. Expect legislatures to enact UCITA-like laws, or even stuff like Senator Holling's TBPDTPADTAPA abortion.
You can also expect a technical thrust: replacing TCP/IP with some base protocol(s) that make a very strict distinction between "server" and "client". This might come from Microsoft and not from the MPAA/RIAA/legislative thrust. "Palladium" just might be part of this. The protocol might even be proprietary very costly to obtain the spec if one even exists. But it will cost tons of money to run a "server" for that protocol, one way or the other. Either the software will be pricey or a network hookup that accepts special "server" packets will be pricey.
When has the music industry not been one giant mess? Wasn't there a payola scandal in radio in the mid-50s or ealy 60s?
I'm dating myself but when I was a kid you could go into record store (yes vinyl records) and right up front see the rack of the Top 40 "45s". Even 10-year-olds could figure out that the ratings weren't exactly based on what other people thought of the songs. For instance how did a song get into the Top 40 to start with? The Top 40 rack was the only source of 45s in the store and the LP containing the songs on the 45 didn't usually make the racks until well after the "hit single" was in heavy rotation on the local radio station. So who was "voting for" or buying the 45s to get them into the Top 40 in the first place? Nobody heard the songs until the 45s appeared in the rack.
Periodically obvious poop made it into the Top 40 temporarily. Nobody and I really mean nobody listened to about a quarter of the 45s in the Top 40.
I've heard that the music industry is totally 0wned by the mob but I'm not too sure about this. If mob-0wnership is the case the situation just won't change.
Most likely if Linux was suddenly to become more widespread due to the sudden disappearance of Microsoft then virus writers would devote all of their time in finding vulnerabilities in Linux.
Ah the ol' "Marketshare" Argument. That's a good one mainly because it's entirely irrefutable. Linux will not suddenly become widespread because MSFT will not suddenly disappear.
Rather loosely last year's worms do refute this though. Ignoring chainmailers like Klez and Sircam (Outlook infectors with no linux analog) there were probably more worms for linux and unix than there were for Windows.
What did we have for Windows? Code Red Code Red 2 and Nimda. What did we have for Linux and Unix? Ramen l10n Cheese Adore sadmind/IIS ldpw0rm x.c. Might have been a few more. Looks like worm writers are already concentrating on linux despite its less-than-stellar market share.
Similarly why am I *still* suffering from Nimda and Code Red? Apache has almost double the market share that IIS has according to Netcraft. Where's the Apache worms that the hackers and crackers wrote for the world's most popular platform?
The marketshare argument just doesn't hold up. It's just an apology for MSFT's weak applications.
It's been more-or-less common knowledge that McAfee has done this since the Michelangelo scare in 1993.
I recommend going to vmyths.com to read their "rantings" section.
Let me predict that about 50% of the replies in this thread will consist of arguments like "Well even if we did get rid of MSFT products we'd still have a virus problem: look at staoG or Bliss or Ramen or the '88 Internet worm."
Those replies are guilty of a flaw called The Excluded Middle where one argues that a situation that in reality has a spectrum of situations only has the 2 extreme cases. In this case the replies will say that even Linux has viruses and worms (true and probably inescapable for a Turing-complete computer) so doing away with the source of 99.44% of viruses and worms won't solve the problem.
Of course this is crap. I'm still getting hits from Code Red I v2 nearly 10 months after it was released. When was the last time you got a sadmind/IIS hit? The problem isn't to eliminate 100% of all worms chainmails and viruses the problem is to keep worms chainmails and viruses from ramping up the exponential part of the logistics curve.
Sure, it's not a clean, 100%-of-the-market textbook economic monopoly, liked you learned about in 7th Grade. Nobody ever said it was.
Fortunately, economists typically have more than a 7th Grade education. So, "monopoly" isn't usually that pure even in economics texts. Lookup up "Four Firm Concentration Ratio" or "Herfindahl-Hirschman Index". By either of those measures, MSFT enjoys unprecedented monopoly power (which doesn't require 100% market share).
I think this Liebowitz is one of the co-authors of the famous Fable of the Keys paper. I read the "Fable of the Keys" and I was unimpressed - no new research, just criticism of other's research, all to support a very doctrinaire laissez faire free market position about QWERTY keyboards.
I'm really surprised that he's letting facts get in it the way.
You'd be better off not looking at an Anti-Virus company's description of any of these worms. Because of the AV community's deep-seated belief that if they give away even the tiniest shred of information about how a virus works, they end up writing the least informative descriptions possible.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more than one problem here. First, who gets to define "terrorist"? One man's freedom figher is another man's terrorist. Find out what Reagan had to say about the Mujahadeen in the 80s, then think about what Bush said about the Taliban (one of the components of the Mujahadeen) in 2001.
Second "the Pentagon" is nominally prevented from law enforcement. If "the Pentagon" goes trawling for terrorists in the US civilian population a principle that has served the US very well goes by the wayside: the military and the navy get used against US citizens. The old USSR shows us the dangers of that path.
Thirdly, we risk a new McCarthyism: do we really want to reinstate guilt by association? There's an extra danger in what Poindexter proposes, too. Do we want the association made by buggy computer programs?
Fouth, we risk giving up an almost sacred principle, that of due process.
-- Thomas Jefferson.That's exactly the point of Judge Jackson ruling that MSFT performed illegal monopoly maintenance: MSFT squashes potential rivals and potentially superior products and services.
Read a little basic microeconomics. All but the most ideologically radical economists acknowledge that a free market is a good thing but that free markets aren't really that great at keeping free markets free.
That might constitute a bad example. I think that record companies distributed Heavy Metal bands on vinyl far longer than any other genre because the improved quality of CDs just didn't make any discernable difference to either the listeners or to the music.
Let's face it: primarily the record companies moved us all to CDs to allow them to let slide their back catalog of LPs and secondarily because CD sound is better. I don't want to hear that the sound is better from any "audiophiles" either. Audiophiles are the same morons who bought distilled water from discWasher for $5 for 4 ounces and buy "directional" speaker cables today and who use a green magic marker on the rim of their CDs. And then claim to be able to hear phase-shift distortion in CD music.
I don't think the proposed system will work for every one. I think that most workers in development groups will end up getting spanked for what the system interprets as "misbehavior". A developer unit-testing pieces of an application may end up deleting large swaths of files to see how a routine responds to missing files. A developer may write a "dummy server" that just sends streams of random bytes to test how a client process responds to bad input data. Testers may have to reset dates on machines to verify leap year compliance. Testers may make a bunch of files read-only to see how an app handles a log file that has bad permissions.
These are all legit operations - I've done every single one as part of testing or unit-testing in the past. They're also all operations that might be part of a local or remote root exploit.
The Management will have to turn off the profiling for certain users to avoid periodically getting swamped with false alarms or cutting off testing during the final phases of product development.
I have to conclude that it's just more snake oil
I'll believe in this belief. Years ago, maybe 1989 or 1990, I had a conversation with an engineer at then-major aerospace company Martin Marietta. He was no dummy, but he carried the misbelief that a computer virus was something that occurred naturally, like an influenza virus, or herpes.
In conjunction with the "if anything's wrong with my computer, it's a virus" phenomena you see every day amongst business types, an 80% belief rate isn't unlikely, even in the USA.
I blame the Anti-Virus industry at least partially for this. Members of the AV community are so tight-lipped about viruses that they end up being almost mystical. AV people seem to believe that any real information about a virus or worm will foster further virus and/or worm writing. So they don't give out any real information (like "Using Outlook will inevitably cause you to get infected. Switch to something else"). They even seem to have helped the trend of calling any malware a "virus" because of this.
What's your best guess on how Judge Kollar-Kotelly will rule? The Judge Jackson's ruling came as an utter and complete surprise to almost everyone who hadn't followed *web* reports on the trial. The mass media did a very bad job protraying the issues of the original trial, basically parroting MSFT and Wag-Edd's "freedom to innovate" press releases, rather than reporting on the fairly straightforward restraint of trade case that the DoJ made. This time around, the web reporters seemed a bit confused by how the case went as well.
Everything Don Norman writes about is so abstracted from the real world that I have to wonder when (or even if) he last sat down and wrote a program. Any program. Sure he's ideologically pure but like Bruce Tognazzini everything he advocates can't quite be backed up with research. It's just hot air.
C'mon - it's 2002. If you've got it flaunt it. Put some code or a peer-reviewed paper on the web for everyone to try out. If you don't have code have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.
Yes, spam is theft. And thank you for the straw man.
I doubt that anyone who's thought about the music piracy issue for longer than 6 seconds takes the extremely simplistic position straw man summary you made. Media piracy is a copyright violation first, and maybe only. Yes, massive-scale copyright violations (think Taiwan) consitute theft, exactly the same way that sending 2 million people an ad they don't want is theft. Copying a few pages out of a book at the library isn't copyright violation, and it's not theft. Sorry, that's the way the courts have ruled.
And before you throw up another straw man, the objections most thoughtful people have to the DMCA or the P2P-hacking-bill or just about anything Jack Valenti says don't involve legalizing theft. The objections involve the balance between government granted monopolies (like copyright and patents) and the fair use by the governed citizens.
Rubbish. Advertising has to be true (see various Truth in Advertising statutes) while other speech does not. Some things cannot be advertised: How long has it been since you've seen a cigarette ad on Tee Vee? You have absolutely no right to advertise anything, much less on my nickle, as spammers do.
Libertarians have never enjoyed theft. Since email spam is theft (advertising is NOT protected speech, and even it were protected, I wouldn't have to pay to hear it), spammers are thieves, mere common criminals, not first amendment martyrs.
Try again, DMA troll.
Sure, make them pay. But then, chop them up into small pieces, put the pieces into gallon jugs of gasoline, set the gas on fire and throw the burning jugs into SF Bay on national tee vee.
Spammers have proven to be so stupid that only the most Flagrantly Over the Top Demonstration of Hatred will teach some of them a lesson.
That's right, spammers: you're all incoherent stumble-bums, whose ravings are not listened to in polite society. When we can legally kill you, we will.
US public schools don't have the purpose of giving out learning. You made a common mistake. US public schools have a couple of purposes: (1) producing factory workers (2) keeping 13-18 year olds out of the labor market.
I've yet to see an explanation (other than "It's Magic!") of how a Palladium/TCPA/Fritz-chipped computer will end up more secure against viruses and worms. For starters, note that the most prevalent viruses for the last several years have affected *macros*, and assume that the "worms" they talk about are things like Klez, SirCam and etc, basically Outlook viruses.
Certainly in a Fritzed Palladium computer, software like Word and Outlook will have "certification". I mean, MSFT will certify their own software, right? The Word macro virus just gets interpreted by the certified Word executable. Similarly, Klez would just cause the "certified" Outlook executable to do certain things.
Given that any computing system that is Turing-complete can support viruses, how does Palladium make a system resistant to them? Is a Palladium system just not Turing-complete? Will "certified" executables not have features like scripting languages, macros, etc built into them?
Only if you define "violence" as a technical solution. I feel that the masses must rise up and commit some obscenely violent form of punishment on a spammer or two, the more colorful and widely-reported, the better. The violence must be as graphic and horrific as possible, to deter the remaining, live, spammers.
But seriously folks, there is no technical solution. Spam is what it is because of intent, context and interpretation. Those are the qualities that technical solutions just can't determine by themselves.
Technical solutions won't work - we need a political or legal solution, before SMTP-based email breaks down, and MSFT steps in with a pay-per-message "MSMTP" protocol, where it costs at least $25,000 to run a server.
The European Space Agency has made available VHDL for a CPU that implements the SPARC V8 instruction set. The VHDL is available under the GNU LGPL license. Granted, implementations of LEON are slow (25 MHz?) but it's totally freely available. You may need to buy a $99 license from SPARC International to actually sell any CPUs you make, but that's pretty cheap.
The SPARC instruction set is pretty simple. I don't imagine that a similar effort for x86 CPUs would be as simple or as quick.
The telcos and cablemodem companies have never really liked to provide freewheeling internet access. The cable companies in particular have a "broadcast" mentality where someone pays to provide "content" and the unwashed massses pay to view the "content". Unfortunately for them, all the cool stuff requires two-way communications. A very unfortunate side effect of providing communication back from the "viewers" using TCP/IP is that the "viewers" can now do content themselves.
DSL and cablemodem people have an ugly history of AUPs that prevent running "servers". They have a history of blocking port 80 (and other ports) inbound to their clients.
There's two real problems inherent in this mess:
So what does this predict for the future? A couple of things: first, MPAA and RIAA and whatever the TV and radio trade associations are will continue to try to legislate things, since they no longer have the mental or moral wherewithal to make any new art. Expect DMCA enforcement to continue to get worse. Expect legislatures to enact UCITA-like laws, or even stuff like Senator Holling's TBPDTPADTAPA abortion.
You can also expect a technical thrust: replacing TCP/IP with some base protocol(s) that make a very strict distinction between "server" and "client". This might come from Microsoft and not from the MPAA/RIAA/legislative thrust. "Palladium" just might be part of this. The protocol might even be proprietary very costly to obtain the spec if one even exists. But it will cost tons of money to run a "server" for that protocol, one way or the other. Either the software will be pricey or a network hookup that accepts special "server" packets will be pricey.
When has the music industry not been one giant mess? Wasn't there a payola scandal in radio in the mid-50s or ealy 60s?
I'm dating myself but when I was a kid you could go into record store (yes vinyl records) and right up front see the rack of the Top 40 "45s". Even 10-year-olds could figure out that the ratings weren't exactly based on what other people thought of the songs. For instance how did a song get into the Top 40 to start with? The Top 40 rack was the only source of 45s in the store and the LP containing the songs on the 45 didn't usually make the racks until well after the "hit single" was in heavy rotation on the local radio station. So who was "voting for" or buying the 45s to get them into the Top 40 in the first place? Nobody heard the songs until the 45s appeared in the rack.
Periodically obvious poop made it into the Top 40 temporarily. Nobody and I really mean nobody listened to about a quarter of the 45s in the Top 40.
I've heard that the music industry is totally 0wned by the mob but I'm not too sure about this. If mob-0wnership is the case the situation just won't change.
Most likely if Linux was suddenly to become more widespread due to the sudden disappearance of Microsoft then virus writers would devote all of their time in finding vulnerabilities in Linux.
Ah the ol' "Marketshare" Argument. That's a good one mainly because it's entirely irrefutable. Linux will not suddenly become widespread because MSFT will not suddenly disappear.
Rather loosely last year's worms do refute this though. Ignoring chainmailers like Klez and Sircam (Outlook infectors with no linux analog) there were probably more worms for linux and unix than there were for Windows.
What did we have for Windows? Code Red Code Red 2 and Nimda. What did we have for Linux and Unix? Ramen l10n Cheese Adore sadmind/IIS ldpw0rm x.c. Might have been a few more. Looks like worm writers are already concentrating on linux despite its less-than-stellar market share.
Similarly why am I *still* suffering from Nimda and Code Red? Apache has almost double the market share that IIS has according to Netcraft. Where's the Apache worms that the hackers and crackers wrote for the world's most popular platform?
The marketshare argument just doesn't hold up. It's just an apology for MSFT's weak applications.
It's been more-or-less common knowledge that McAfee has done this since the Michelangelo scare in 1993.
I recommend going to vmyths.com to read their "rantings" section.
Let me predict that about 50% of the replies in this thread will consist of arguments like "Well even if we did get rid of MSFT products we'd still have a virus problem: look at staoG or Bliss or Ramen or the '88 Internet worm."
Those replies are guilty of a flaw called The Excluded Middle where one argues that a situation that in reality has a spectrum of situations only has the 2 extreme cases. In this case the replies will say that even Linux has viruses and worms (true and probably inescapable for a Turing-complete computer) so doing away with the source of 99.44% of viruses and worms won't solve the problem.
Of course this is crap. I'm still getting hits from Code Red I v2 nearly 10 months after it was released. When was the last time you got a sadmind/IIS hit? The problem isn't to eliminate 100% of all worms chainmails and viruses the problem is to keep worms chainmails and viruses from ramping up the exponential part of the logistics curve.
Sure, it's not a clean, 100%-of-the-market textbook economic monopoly, liked you learned about in 7th Grade. Nobody ever said it was.
Fortunately, economists typically have more than a 7th Grade education. So, "monopoly" isn't usually that pure even in economics texts. Lookup up "Four Firm Concentration Ratio" or "Herfindahl-Hirschman Index". By either of those measures, MSFT enjoys unprecedented monopoly power (which doesn't require 100% market share).
I think this Liebowitz is one of the co-authors of the famous Fable of the Keys paper. I read the "Fable of the Keys" and I was unimpressed - no new research, just criticism of other's research, all to support a very doctrinaire laissez faire free market position about QWERTY keyboards.
I'm really surprised that he's letting facts get in it the way.
I'm only aware of a couple of other worms from last year:
From a few years ago:
You'd be better off not looking at an Anti-Virus company's description of any of these worms. Because of the AV community's deep-seated belief that if they give away even the tiniest shred of information about how a virus works, they end up writing the least informative descriptions possible.