Or think of how it would affect our government...do you think the people of the US would put up with it's government detaining people and putting them in camps without representation or a public trial if they could personally remember things like the roundup of innocent Japanese Americans during WWII?
well...I guess this *is* the US, but still, you get the point. A lot of people forget the past atrocities of their government after a single generation passes.
I have two of them. It's my favorite by far....instead of a wheel, it's got a trackpoint (eraser-thing like on some laptops) there. The trackpoint doesn't move the cursor, but it does scroll. And it works vertically and horozintally.
If it had a 3rd button, it would be the best mouse ever.
Of course, the topic of price came into play. "It's free", she said. You know what? I don't think I've ever seen a more confused look on a 50 year-old man's face. "What's the gimmick?" He asked. She proceeded to explain to him about OSS, and he just got more confused.
BINGO! What a lot of Linux-type-people tend to forget isn't that people equate "free" with "crap". Not at all- instead they equate it with advertisement-laden intrusionware. Think realplayer. If you could get rid of all that extra crap, it might actually be a decent piece of software. It's not necessarily that free = crap, it's that free = gimmick.
When O'Reilly publishes a new book, I should buy it, scan in the pages into an electronic format and put it on the internet for the whole world to copy. After all, "copyright doesn't make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copiable", and all I did was easily and cheaply copy a book.
Whoa, hold on there. I can see the point you're trying to make here, but your analogy is flawed. Have you ever scanned a whole book? If that's your idea of cheap and easy, then the folks over at Project Guttenburg would like to talk to you. Ripping a CD (or even a DVD) is an order of magnitude easier then scanning an entire book. Especially any book on perl. Can you imagine the OCR software trying to figure out PERL source code?!?
True, but most companies that are big enough to have a real CIO and procurement departments are probably not buying a lot of Intel hardware anyhow. And even if they are, they are probably already comfortable (or at least familiar) with Sun. Smaller companies (target market for this stuff) IT departments tend to rely heavily on their in-house geeks to decide what to buy. Initiatives in the smaller companies I've worked for went a lot like this:
"Your goal is to implement X. Your budget is Y. Give me status reports weekly. Go!"
"Hey, not enough people are buying our most profitable hardware! Lets give them MORE reasons to think about buying something else!!!" - Scott McNeely.
As opposed to sit on your laurels and wither away? The rest of the industry is not going to stop...to do nothing is certain death. Doing *something* may lead you to the same end, but you have to try.
Because not only is Sun competing with similar hardware, they are selling it for a good price. After owning examples from both manufacturers, I would bet on Sun's hardware quality (x86 or otherwise) over Dell's any day of the week. For the same price, I'll pick Sun every time.
HP/Compaq? They're in the same league as Sun (HW quality-wise), but just spot-checking one of their ProLiant servers against the v65 configured similarly, the Sun machine is a little cheaper (no OS selected on the Compaq). Close enough to consider both. Again, after working for a company that has owned both, I still lean towards Sun as far as general hardware goodness. Hopefully this new kit lives up to that reputation.
That's what makes Sun able to compete in this market. Good hardware at a competitive price. Obviously the rest of the "commodity vendors" find it worthwhile to be in business.
Err....no. While that'd be nice, that's not the case. SCO (and previously Caldera) was simply a distributor this this case. They took what other people produced and packaged it for consumer (or business) use. Just like RedHat, et al. does. The person (or company) who originally released it is the only one who could GPL it. Since that person (according to SCO, anyhow)*didn't* actually produce that code, they cannot GPL it and it's still SCO's property. In any case, SCO just repackaged what they thought (at first) was somebody else's GPL'd code. They never licensed anything under the GPL. That's their story anyhow....
Whether all of that is true or not remains to be seen...
The variable bit rate encoding is rather nice, but again, what can this do that my computer (with a dvd burner and all in wonder 9700) can't?
1. Sit nicely (and quietly) in your tv stand/entertainment center.
2. Be used by somebody other than a CS graduate
3. Work properly out of the box
4. Remote control without buying extra hardware and programming
5. Be used without having a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached.
Consumers will simply not put up with those inconveniences for something like this. Sometimes, it's worth spending $$ for. Maybe not the price of a small car, but something...hooking up a real PC to your entertainment center is still for serious geeks...
Right, I see what you (and the other poster below) are saying, and if you want to split hairs, you're correct. In fact, that's the whole point. Once it's on your wires, it *should* be up to you to do what you want with it (and it is today for the most part). But if this bill becomes law, that "LAN soverignity" (for lack of a better term) will be gone, and that is why it's a problem. You won't be able to argue your way out of it by saying that the router is an endpoint and anything after that is none of their business. The way this bill accomplishes that is to say that the endpoints of the *communication* path may not by obscured, and that has nothing to do with which device created the packet. It has everything to do with the device that originates or ultimately receives that data *within* those packets. If that's a PC behind your NAT box, then you are (by definition) using said NAT box to obsure it, and will therefore be subject to the applicable penalites.
I'm not arguing it sucks, I'm pointing out that this bill will *explicitly* render that "LAN soverignity" resoning null and void.
the transmission between my router and my ISP is complete, and the new transmission is between my router and one or more PCs on my network.
If only that were the case. The thing is that your router is considered an intermediary device- the final destination/source of the communication *is* your PC at your desk. The router is *not* the source of the communication, it's merely the point where the communication (which originiated at your PC) finds entry to your ISP and the internet. There may be a dozen routers between your router and the final destination of that communication that perform the same function your router does, but clearly, none of those are endpoints either. By that logic, a cellphone tower, your ISP, a TDD/voice relay service or the phone company itself could all be considered endpoints, which is clearly not the case.
While I do agree that what is behind your router is your business, the case that your router *is* the source or destination of the activity within your network is flawed.
All of these are products worthy of mention, of course, and I have seen them all (not all in depth, unfortunately). Perhaps the problem is really that of distribution... I've read the Winbind FAQ on the Samba site on how NSS can look to Samba and how PAM can redirect authentication to many different kinds of sources, but the problem is that they are so difficult (which makes it time consuming for non-pros) to set up, it's not worth it for me.
The difference in time that it takes for me to set up a w2k server versus a Linux server (for a particular purpose and integrated into our NT based network) pays for the w2k license and then some...and because we're already a MS shop, the CALs for w2k are already paid for. I hate the situation, but I don't have free time to spend fixing it.
A company who releases a distribution made to fit well in corporate MS-based networks could be rich. I imagine there are plenty of people like me who are not really happy with their MS products and are quite keen to get something else in the door but just don't have the time and resources to make it happen.
Now Webmin, that is the first thing I install on any Linux box and I can't recommend it highly enough to anybody who is starting out with a small Linux server...
yeah I totally begged my mom to let me rent it every time we went to the video store! I must have seen that movie 50 times as a kid... I found it just a couple years ago at a place that was selling a ton of old rental tapes and picked it up for a buck. I almost can't stand to watch it these days because it actually kind of sucks....takes the magic out of the cool movie I remember...
First, how long are those Win9x clients going to be around after Microsoft drops support for them shortly?
Well, I run a shop with around 200 workstations, mostly Win98. Our technology needs have not substantially changed, and I fully intend to run those Win98 boxes in their current configuration until they all sputter and die. I can make no cost justification to upgrade them otherwise. What have those machines stopped doing that they did 4 years ago? Nothing. Hence, they stay as they are until business demands change.
Then, when those folks are running either Win2K or XP workstations; just how many of them do you expect to be satified with domain services only, and not a full-blown directory service?
Me. I don't have 20 offices in 10 countries around the world. My network has 3 locations that are well connected to each other, and I have no need for anything more complex than NT domain services. In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid such complications until our growth warrants. Until then, anything more complicated is a waste of my time. If I could get Linux servers to talk to machines on my NT domain seamlessly, especially for authentication purposes without trying to keep multiple accounts synchronized (and without trying to become the PDC), I would find much greater use for it.
Until it meshes with what I've got in an easy way, it stays as a web server for me, nothing more. Many will say that I just need to spend the time installing and configuring it properly, but if that takes me a week, I could have just bought the Win2k server license and been done with it. Unfortunately that's the reality.
YES YES! I have one of these and I still use it all the time! I think it was purchased around 1989 (maybe 90)...I remember thinking how neat it was that it did fractions.
Nothing else I ever bought from Casio has lasted anywhere near that long...
That is true! I know the guy that wrote it! I shouldn't name him here, but I can tell you he ran an Amiga BBS (AmiExpress rocked baby) in the late 80s and the original leech program was written in C on the Amiga and tested against other boards in our local calling area. It was all good for the better part of a year before a lot of the boards started upgrading their systems. Usually the fix was if the last CRC check failed, then the account was deducted regardless of whether it was a legitimate error or not. I remember seeing the front end source for Cnet BBS with this fix written into it...
Wow. I can't believe people still remember what that is! that is so cool...
Err... you must have Zmodem confused with something else..it was one way only. You are right about the widely used part though, and not ony warez boards but everywhere. In fact it was the only thing going in the later BBS days.
Maybe puma or one of those oddball protocols are bidirectional, but that was pretty useless to warez runners back in the day, because everybody knows that real k-k00l warez runners use USRobotics Courier HST 9600 high-speed modems, and they were only fast in one direction. Real warez runners spit on v.32 modems...Ahhh the good old days;-) Sorry for the OT folks...
Yeah,it is, but it's true. Our company (a 150-ish person company in a tech industry) uses it pretty extesively internally... turns out half of our supply chain uses it too.
Our IT staff (read: me) threw fits about it when I first started seeing so much traffic to AOL's servers and discovered all kinds of people had been installing it. Turns out the owner and the president both have it on their personal machines and just gave everybody the go-ahead to install it, quite against my recomendations.
As much as I still despise it, I am stunned at how many people actually legitimately use it.
If it weren't being used for legit uses to communicate outside our LAN, then I could get Jabber in the door, but I can't rely on AOL not to screw with the protocols in the future. So it's either risk that, which would naturally be my fault, or endure the ad-supported AIM, security risks and all (exploitation of which would also be my fault). Grr...sorry, I'm beginning to vent...
All I really meant to say is that it really, truly is gaining popularity in legitimate business. AIM isn't just for breakfast anymore...
Erm, there are actually not that many people who get that much junk email per day. Personally I manage 2-4 pieces per day (I'm careful about where I type my email addy). My gf gets probably 10-15, and she will give her address to website that asks.
I'm also an admin for a small business and of about 100 users, there are few who get more than 5-10 pieces of junk mail/day...and these are non-technical sales people who will fill out any web form for any reason at all...I'm extremely curious to see if this law has any effect (I live in MN)...
Yeah but the thing is that when somebody walks into Best Buy to see what they are looking at, all they get is Windows. Nothing else. Or alternatively, let's say they are at a CompUSA or something like that, sure there are Macs, but they need (or want) something similar to what they have at work for whatever reason. In any case, they are buying a Windows PC. As far as they're concerned, Windows is a given and there is nothing to compare.
Of course they *could* buy that sexy little iMac or whatever, but it's not what they are used to, and costs more than the eMachines PC. They just want to surf and play some games anyhow. There is no other choice for this guy, and unfortunately he represents the vast majority of consumers shopping for personal computers. We may not like it, but this is the reality.
This is still all beside the point that it is no excuse for MS to play dirty.
This isn't just some random company that nobody has ever heard of, with a clean slate. It's 2003. When people deal with Microsoft they know what they're getting into, regardless of what Microsoft says.
Sorry, I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. While it's true that people involved in the industry generally know what's up, many people outside of it don't. People who have better things to do than read IT-related media get all of their news about MS from totally mainstream sources in the first place, and lot of people could really give a rat's ass about today's MS article on Yahoo's front page. As far as Joe Sixpack is concerned, it's an IT-related story, and he probably doesn't care what it says. If you are not into the theatre scene, do you read reviews for every play in your area? If you are not interested in business, do you read every story in the business section? Probably not, and my mother doesn't read every store about Microsoft.
Saying that the victim is at fault is not a solution to the problem, and is not an excuse for bad behavior on MS's part.
As soon as I read this, I got on a p2p network and downloaded about 10 "samples". I'm not admitting to anything illegal here, but let's just say these are likely targets if such a worm exists with a 95% infection rate. Also downloaded are the mp3s from ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/songs/, which are dated 4-17-02 and 11-01-02, and therefore apparently have not been updated with newer, supposedly "clean" versions. I also downloaded the OGGS just for fun.
Before I did anything, I installed a clean version of WinMX and Winamp and SFVd all involved files including all the.dlls.
After playing all the mp3s in my collection, including today's downloads, I verified my SFV checksums and guess what? WinMX and Winamp are completely unchanged.
Slashdot Mirror
Or think of how it would affect our government...do you think the people of the US would put up with it's government detaining people and putting them in camps without representation or a public trial if they could personally remember things like the roundup of innocent Japanese Americans during WWII?
well...I guess this *is* the US, but still, you get the point. A lot of people forget the past atrocities of their government after a single generation passes.
I have two of them. It's my favorite by far....instead of a wheel, it's got a trackpoint (eraser-thing like on some laptops) there. The trackpoint doesn't move the cursor, but it does scroll. And it works vertically and horozintally.
If it had a 3rd button, it would be the best mouse ever.
Wheels suck.
Of course, the topic of price came into play. "It's free", she said. You know what? I don't think I've ever seen a more confused look on a 50 year-old man's face. "What's the gimmick?" He asked. She proceeded to explain to him about OSS, and he just got more confused.
BINGO! What a lot of Linux-type-people tend to forget isn't that people equate "free" with "crap". Not at all- instead they equate it with advertisement-laden intrusionware. Think realplayer. If you could get rid of all that extra crap, it might actually be a decent piece of software. It's not necessarily that free = crap, it's that free = gimmick.
When O'Reilly publishes a new book, I should buy it, scan in the pages into an electronic format and put it on the internet for the whole world to copy. After all, "copyright doesn't make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copiable", and all I did was easily and cheaply copy a book.
Whoa, hold on there. I can see the point you're trying to make here, but your analogy is flawed. Have you ever scanned a whole book? If that's your idea of cheap and easy, then the folks over at Project Guttenburg would like to talk to you. Ripping a CD (or even a DVD) is an order of magnitude easier then scanning an entire book. Especially any book on perl. Can you imagine the OCR software trying to figure out PERL source code?!?
True, but most companies that are big enough to have a real CIO and procurement departments are probably not buying a lot of Intel hardware anyhow. And even if they are, they are probably already comfortable (or at least familiar) with Sun. Smaller companies (target market for this stuff) IT departments tend to rely heavily on their in-house geeks to decide what to buy. Initiatives in the smaller companies I've worked for went a lot like this:
"Your goal is to implement X. Your budget is Y. Give me status reports weekly. Go!"
"Hey, not enough people are buying our most profitable hardware! Lets give them MORE reasons to think about buying something else!!!" - Scott McNeely.
As opposed to sit on your laurels and wither away? The rest of the industry is not going to stop...to do nothing is certain death. Doing *something* may lead you to the same end, but you have to try.
Because not only is Sun competing with similar hardware, they are selling it for a good price. After owning examples from both manufacturers, I would bet on Sun's hardware quality (x86 or otherwise) over Dell's any day of the week. For the same price, I'll pick Sun every time.
HP/Compaq? They're in the same league as Sun (HW quality-wise), but just spot-checking one of their ProLiant servers against the v65 configured similarly, the Sun machine is a little cheaper (no OS selected on the Compaq). Close enough to consider both. Again, after working for a company that has owned both, I still lean towards Sun as far as general hardware goodness. Hopefully this new kit lives up to that reputation.
That's what makes Sun able to compete in this market. Good hardware at a competitive price. Obviously the rest of the "commodity vendors" find it worthwhile to be in business.
Err....no. While that'd be nice, that's not the case. SCO (and previously Caldera) was simply a distributor this this case. They took what other people produced and packaged it for consumer (or business) use. Just like RedHat, et al. does. The person (or company) who originally released it is the only one who could GPL it. Since that person (according to SCO, anyhow)*didn't* actually produce that code, they cannot GPL it and it's still SCO's property. In any case, SCO just repackaged what they thought (at first) was somebody else's GPL'd code. They never licensed anything under the GPL. That's their story anyhow....
Whether all of that is true or not remains to be seen...
The variable bit rate encoding is rather nice, but again, what can this do that my computer (with a dvd burner and all in wonder 9700) can't?
1. Sit nicely (and quietly) in your tv stand/entertainment center.
2. Be used by somebody other than a CS graduate
3. Work properly out of the box
4. Remote control without buying extra hardware and programming
5. Be used without having a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached.
Consumers will simply not put up with those inconveniences for something like this. Sometimes, it's worth spending $$ for. Maybe not the price of a small car, but something...hooking up a real PC to your entertainment center is still for serious geeks...
Right, I see what you (and the other poster below) are saying, and if you want to split hairs, you're correct. In fact, that's the whole point. Once it's on your wires, it *should* be up to you to do what you want with it (and it is today for the most part). But if this bill becomes law, that "LAN soverignity" (for lack of a better term) will be gone, and that is why it's a problem. You won't be able to argue your way out of it by saying that the router is an endpoint and anything after that is none of their business. The way this bill accomplishes that is to say that the endpoints of the *communication* path may not by obscured, and that has nothing to do with which device created the packet. It has everything to do with the device that originates or ultimately receives that data *within* those packets. If that's a PC behind your NAT box, then you are (by definition) using said NAT box to obsure it, and will therefore be subject to the applicable penalites.
I'm not arguing it sucks, I'm pointing out that this bill will *explicitly* render that "LAN soverignity" resoning null and void.
the transmission between my router and my ISP is complete, and the new transmission is between my router and one or more PCs on my network.
If only that were the case. The thing is that your router is considered an intermediary device- the final destination/source of the communication *is* your PC at your desk. The router is *not* the source of the communication, it's merely the point where the communication (which originiated at your PC) finds entry to your ISP and the internet. There may be a dozen routers between your router and the final destination of that communication that perform the same function your router does, but clearly, none of those are endpoints either. By that logic, a cellphone tower, your ISP, a TDD/voice relay service or the phone company itself could all be considered endpoints, which is clearly not the case.
While I do agree that what is behind your router is your business, the case that your router *is* the source or destination of the activity within your network is flawed.
All of these are products worthy of mention, of course, and I have seen them all (not all in depth, unfortunately). Perhaps the problem is really that of distribution... I've read the Winbind FAQ on the Samba site on how NSS can look to Samba and how PAM can redirect authentication to many different kinds of sources, but the problem is that they are so difficult (which makes it time consuming for non-pros) to set up, it's not worth it for me.
The difference in time that it takes for me to set up a w2k server versus a Linux server (for a particular purpose and integrated into our NT based network) pays for the w2k license and then some...and because we're already a MS shop, the CALs for w2k are already paid for. I hate the situation, but I don't have free time to spend fixing it.
A company who releases a distribution made to fit well in corporate MS-based networks could be rich. I imagine there are plenty of people like me who are not really happy with their MS products and are quite keen to get something else in the door but just don't have the time and resources to make it happen.
Now Webmin, that is the first thing I install on any Linux box and I can't recommend it highly enough to anybody who is starting out with a small Linux server...
yeah I totally begged my mom to let me rent it every time we went to the video store! I must have seen that movie 50 times as a kid... I found it just a couple years ago at a place that was selling a ton of old rental tapes and picked it up for a buck. I almost can't stand to watch it these days because it actually kind of sucks....takes the magic out of the cool movie I remember...
First, how long are those Win9x clients going to be around after Microsoft drops support for them shortly?
Well, I run a shop with around 200 workstations, mostly Win98. Our technology needs have not substantially changed, and I fully intend to run those Win98 boxes in their current configuration until they all sputter and die. I can make no cost justification to upgrade them otherwise. What have those machines stopped doing that they did 4 years ago? Nothing. Hence, they stay as they are until business demands change.
Then, when those folks are running either Win2K or XP workstations; just how many of them do you expect to be satified with domain services only, and not a full-blown directory service?
Me. I don't have 20 offices in 10 countries around the world. My network has 3 locations that are well connected to each other, and I have no need for anything more complex than NT domain services. In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid such complications until our growth warrants. Until then, anything more complicated is a waste of my time. If I could get Linux servers to talk to machines on my NT domain seamlessly, especially for authentication purposes without trying to keep multiple accounts synchronized (and without trying to become the PDC), I would find much greater use for it.
Until it meshes with what I've got in an easy way, it stays as a web server for me, nothing more. Many will say that I just need to spend the time installing and configuring it properly, but if that takes me a week, I could have just bought the Win2k server license and been done with it. Unfortunately that's the reality.
All IMHO, of course...
Yep, and my originial 1982 C64 (with the ugly brown case and the ugly brown keys) still works as well as the day it was new.
Except for the stuipd "A" key (not an "a" key but the "A" key) never works. Commodore never could make a good "A" key. Oh well.
YES YES! I have one of these and I still use it all the time! I think it was purchased around 1989 (maybe 90)...I remember thinking how neat it was that it did fractions.
Nothing else I ever bought from Casio has lasted anywhere near that long...
That is true! I know the guy that wrote it! I shouldn't name him here, but I can tell you he ran an Amiga BBS (AmiExpress rocked baby) in the late 80s and the original leech program was written in C on the Amiga and tested against other boards in our local calling area. It was all good for the better part of a year before a lot of the boards started upgrading their systems. Usually the fix was if the last CRC check failed, then the account was deducted regardless of whether it was a legitimate error or not. I remember seeing the front end source for Cnet BBS with this fix written into it...
Wow. I can't believe people still remember what that is! that is so cool...
Err... you must have Zmodem confused with something else..it was one way only. You are right about the widely used part though, and not ony warez boards but everywhere. In fact it was the only thing going in the later BBS days.
;-) Sorry for the OT folks...
Maybe puma or one of those oddball protocols are bidirectional, but that was pretty useless to warez runners back in the day, because everybody knows that real k-k00l warez runners use USRobotics Courier HST 9600 high-speed modems, and they were only fast in one direction. Real warez runners spit on v.32 modems...Ahhh the good old days
Yeah,it is, but it's true. Our company (a 150-ish person company in a tech industry) uses it pretty extesively internally... turns out half of our supply chain uses it too.
Our IT staff (read: me) threw fits about it when I first started seeing so much traffic to AOL's servers and discovered all kinds of people had been installing it. Turns out the owner and the president both have it on their personal machines and just gave everybody the go-ahead to install it, quite against my recomendations.
As much as I still despise it, I am stunned at how many people actually legitimately use it.
If it weren't being used for legit uses to communicate outside our LAN, then I could get Jabber in the door, but I can't rely on AOL not to screw with the protocols in the future. So it's either risk that, which would naturally be my fault, or endure the ad-supported AIM, security risks and all (exploitation of which would also be my fault). Grr...sorry, I'm beginning to vent...
All I really meant to say is that it really, truly is gaining popularity in legitimate business. AIM isn't just for breakfast anymore...
Erm, there are actually not that many people who get that much junk email per day. Personally I manage 2-4 pieces per day (I'm careful about where I type my email addy). My gf gets probably 10-15, and she will give her address to website that asks.
I'm also an admin for a small business and of about 100 users, there are few who get more than 5-10 pieces of junk mail/day...and these are non-technical sales people who will fill out any web form for any reason at all...I'm extremely curious to see if this law has any effect (I live in MN)...
I'm just sayin...
Yeah but the thing is that when somebody walks into Best Buy to see what they are looking at, all they get is Windows. Nothing else. Or alternatively, let's say they are at a CompUSA or something like that, sure there are Macs, but they need (or want) something similar to what they have at work for whatever reason. In any case, they are buying a Windows PC. As far as they're concerned, Windows is a given and there is nothing to compare.
Of course they *could* buy that sexy little iMac or whatever, but it's not what they are used to, and costs more than the eMachines PC. They just want to surf and play some games anyhow. There is no other choice for this guy, and unfortunately he represents the vast majority of consumers shopping for personal computers. We may not like it, but this is the reality.
This is still all beside the point that it is no excuse for MS to play dirty.
This isn't just some random company that nobody has ever heard of, with a clean slate. It's 2003. When people deal with Microsoft they know what they're getting into, regardless of what Microsoft says.
Sorry, I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. While it's true that people involved in the industry generally know what's up, many people outside of it don't. People who have better things to do than read IT-related media get all of their news about MS from totally mainstream sources in the first place, and lot of people could really give a rat's ass about today's MS article on Yahoo's front page. As far as Joe Sixpack is concerned, it's an IT-related story, and he probably doesn't care what it says. If you are not into the theatre scene, do you read reviews for every play in your area? If you are not interested in business, do you read every story in the business section? Probably not, and my mother doesn't read every store about Microsoft.
Saying that the victim is at fault is not a solution to the problem, and is not an excuse for bad behavior on MS's part.
Just like I've always said!! Windows is incredibly insecu.. ehh...
Um...oh. never mind.
Who says geeks don't have good people skills?
As soon as I read this, I got on a p2p network and downloaded about 10 "samples". I'm not admitting to anything illegal here, but let's just say these are likely targets if such a worm exists with a 95% infection rate. Also downloaded are the mp3s from ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/songs/, which are dated 4-17-02 and 11-01-02, and therefore apparently have not been updated with newer, supposedly "clean" versions. I also downloaded the OGGS just for fun.
.dlls.
Before I did anything, I installed a clean version of WinMX and Winamp and SFVd all involved files including all the
After playing all the mp3s in my collection, including today's downloads, I verified my SFV checksums and guess what? WinMX and Winamp are completely unchanged.
Deleted the files that don't belong to me.
CONCLUSION: FUD, crock, bullsh*t, crap, crap, crap.