I think you'll find most of these operators who create malware are ahead of the game and have structured their business such that it operates from a country where it is beyond litigation.
However in cases like this where the malware is being delivered on mass by a third party who happens to be a large very well respected operation there is definitely a chance for litigation of some sort. I think when you operate a domain you have a responsibility for the content that is delivered when a user browsers to your site. I don't think it should matter if your site has only relayed content from another domain, ultimately you should be responsible for the service you provide.
In a case like this where hundreds of thousands of people may have incurred damage to their systems, and lost time in cleaning up their systems, the damages could be quite large. You're talking about people's time and potential loss of valuable business data and/or personal items. In this circumstance people would be well entitled to compensation for their loss.
I don't think it'll be long before a mainstream operator runs into a class action suit as a result of negligence in assuring the content sent via their site is safe.
I'll second that, I ran into this almost a year ago, I too wrote an email to complain and received no reply.
After a long holiday from Dilbert coincidently I visited Dilbert again just last night and to my shock got an even more agreesive form of attack which left me scanning my hard disk for a good two hours afterwards just to make sure that they hadn't used a browser exploit to infect my machine.
I emailed United Media again last night here's a copy...
I think you should know that one of the banner ads that is occasionally appearing when you visit the Dilbert comic website redirects you from the Dilbert site to another domain - www.errorsafe.com. Where upon you are continuously assaulted with popups attempting to get you to install Errorsafe's spyware software. This software poses as an antivirus application but in actual fact deliberately installs malware on to your machine, and then attempts to get you to pay money to remove it. This is basically outright fraud and blackmail, I have no doubt you'll find this company operates in a country beyond reach of litigation.
Errorsafe is notorious and well documented by numerous anti-spyware companies such as symnatec http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup. jsp?docid=2006-012017-0346-99. I think it's a very serious matter to allow Errorsafe to inject malcious script into your sites exposing visitors to your domain to such a deceptive incidious organisation whose business is to cause damage and monetary loss to those unwary enough to fall pray to it. I could go so far to say that whilst Errorsafe may be beyond the law, you may actually be in part (or fully) liable for any damages caused by Errorsafe to those visiting your domain.
This has been going on for quite some time now (at least a year). I'm really quite shocked that such a high profile site such as United Media would be linked to such criminal activity.
In short, I really think it would be in your best interest to make sure that Errorsafe is not permitted to "advertise" on any of your websites.
Michael
I've since added this domain (www.errorsafe.com) to the list of no go domains for my browser to ensure that my computer never attempts to load content from that domain again. Can anyone suggest a reliable site that you might find a list of domains that a security conscious user should put in their ban list ?
Having some sort of service that updates a list of banned domains on your system would be a great way to nullify these sorts of attacks. However I guess this could become an extremely dangerous tool for an authority wanting to censor the web.
Woohoo.... as in no more advertising. No more people trying to track and know everything about you in the quest to sell you something. I don't think there's a chance that this will actually stop google or someone else from doing their best to invade the privacy of every living soul on the planet.
Don't worry about your advertising dollars, there's millions of people (some of them working for google). Thinking up ways to track, record and learn everything there is to know to someone and have absolute control over what business's get utilise or take advantage of this information.
However watchout ! Once someone actually cracks this and comes up with the model of all advertising models, that company will have the power to help you destroy your competition, or the power to help your competition destroy you and you can bet they'll take the highest bid (which will be very high indeed).
All you people who think Google is so neat.... well... you need to think a little more.
True finding the right resources is hard. But it's not impossible. I think even if your team does not have the right people, and you don't have the experience, long term it is far better for a company to cultivate it's own product development process. I think if you're in there for the long hall you want to be continuously improving your company's software development process. There's enough help out on the web that will enable you to grow your staff and help get your company heading in the right direction on the CMM scale.
Always always always at the start of a project get feedback from clients and management as early as you possibly can. Never wait till you're at a stage where weeks of time has gone into something before giving anyone a glimpse of it. At the start of a project you need to stay small and agile. As your project grows larger you lose your agility, this is why its so important that the open slather changes occur when the project is still at the small phase.
I agreee... pair programming is definitely far better than code reviews. Pair programming is in fact like an on the fly code review. The "hurt feelings" come from people getting too attached to code they have written, when pair programming the attachment never has a chance to take hold as the changes that would come with a review are often made on the fly.
In a situation where you are willing to throw unlimited resources at a software feature to get it implemented, you would choose pair programming every time. Unless the code is really critical further code reviews of pair programmed code are probably not necessary, and the changes that come out of a review are most likely going to be far less substantial than what may have eventuated from a single developer's work.
However this is not to say I would always use pair programming in preference to code reviews. On a tight budget with less time pressure you may consider code reviews, as it takes far less man hours to review code than it does with pair programming. In a review you tend to skim much of the hum drum (but necessary) parts of the code and focus on where the real meat of the problem is dealt with, to attain how it has been tackled or if it has been implemented as per the design.
I would estimate pair programming takes up about 80% more man hours than code reviews, excluding the odd result of a code review where a developer really makes a major stuff up and a complete re-write is required.
I would tend to use pair programming in two situations: when training a junior up (till they become productive on their own) or on critical jobs (ie jobs on the critical path, that if not completed on time will delay other jobs or tasks) and code reviews for everything else. As for "hurt feelings" with code reviews; get over it; get professional.
You are speaking from a service related software development experience. It's quite a different dynamic when you are producing software for a market as opposed to a particular client. Lost market opportunities offer significantly more pressure than the prospect of losing a single customer. I think it's far easier to resist schedule pressures when there's a single customer at risk. Markets tend to be far more ruthless and less forgiving, schedule blow outs can lead to death for a business, when the market is lost to a competitor.
I think there is a minimum time a software project can be completed in, and in large projects achieving this minimum time, almost never would involve the omission of documentation and employing methodologies.
If this minimum time is greater than the time available then compromises need to be made with either your software development process or your business goals.
The key to success in the software business is to be pragmatic, to have the right balance between software and business requirements. Development techniques such as Extreme Programming and methodologies such as UML are very flexible and can add value with even a minimal amount of time spent employing them.
It's this notion that not going off and making a total ass over end cock up of a project, and "taking the time to do things right" that is really the problem with allot of developers, and managers attitude to software development.
The quickest way to get a project done is to do it right ONCE! Not five times badly. At developer meetings I've often heard managers or developers call UML and other methodologies a waste of time or unnecessary, it always flabbergasts me to hear such ignorance.
I've been in a situation where an (un)manager told me "We don't have the time to do document and do things the right way", my response was "No, we don't have the time not to do things the right way". We only had 6-8 months to get a large project out, with four programmers, a business analyst and two DBA's. I was told I wasn't to spend time in UML and documentation land, and you know what, I ignored him and spent 3-5 days creating high level class diagrams and interaction diagrams, the core of which lasted us through the entire project.
Any project that you forecast is going to take longer than 3 man weeks ie 120 hours needs some sort of design in place to ensure that the major architectural constructs are already decided before coding takes place.
The key to employing methodologies in projects successfully is unfortunately experience. It takes experience to use methodologies successfully, it takes experience to create good designs for applications and to judge when a design has become mature enough to allow development to commence without the risk of major refactoring later on in the project.
It does in fact take time to acquire this experience (years in fact), but it does not take time to employ this experience once it has been acquired. If you feel like your project needs some sort of methodologies in place, but "you don't have the time", the answer is simple, it's not that you don't have the time, you don't have the right personnel. It's true if you have no one with the experience of delivering the architecture required in a professional and timely manner then taking on methodologies new to everyone on the team is going to take time and lots of it. A good manager however will make sure that the project is correctly resourced.
So... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?
It's not like they have done nothing, they have actually gone to some expense to comply with many of the anti-trust rulings, and information they have been required to produce is available, just not to the satisfaction of the EU's technical/legal advisors.
You can find info on Microsoft's Communication Protocols here There's also a program which gives access to source code specifically trying to appease the EU here
I mean it's pretty hard for Microsoft to defend themselves in this circumstance, where the group they are in dispute with is also the judge and jury.
Have you thought perhaps maybe just maybe the EU has decided it'd like a slice of Microsoft war chest and has just decided it'll make up whatever excuse and take some.
And there's probably thousands more web sites like this containing e-books. I think this illustrates that there's absolutely no need for an entity such as google to create a central repository of such resources. What's needed are open document standards and a better system for indexing and searching for these documents on the internet. I think the prospect of an entity such as google having a monopoly or attempting to gain a monopoly over such resources is really quite frightening.
It's seven people over the space of 10 years with 5 of those people having been diagnosed in the last month.... which strangely coincides with the implementation of Telstra's 3G network, which of course would require an increase in the power and radiation coming from the towers.
So when your ass in on fire, do you run for water when you smell the smoke ? Or do you wait until you can feel the flames ? Maybe you should go work there for a few years and show us how much of a non-issue this is.
If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really
It wouldn't need enforcing. You vastly over rate the intelligence of those operating porn systems and those using them. Operators would go for the xxx domain simply because it would be good for cooler sounding domain names, and users would go for xxx as it's easier to associate with porn than.com or.net domains. Plus alot those operating porn sites would know, that net nanny is not going to stop a teen figuring out how to access.xxx domain porn if they really want to.
They could just use Psiphon to get access, or some other trick, I think it'll be another couple of generations before any parent has a hope of out-teching their children and/or their children's friends.
This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the.xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves
Your argument is based on people running porn sites having a brain.... I know for a fact they don't. I guarentee that most of these guys would go for xxx as it makes their domain name sound really cool and easier to find for the half-wits using their sites.
How diplomatic of you. Come on !!! He's completely and utterly wrong as in his statement is 0% accurate
Yeah, there would be a rush. But that's just evidence that the TLD system is busted. There wouldn't be as big a rush if it was.xxx.us.
Hmmm so you're saying if they had made the.XXX domain then there would have been a rush and not everyone would have been able to register the domain they wanted for their porn site..... And the problem with this would be ?!! We might have less porn on the internet ?
So you're advocating every country allow the registering of.xxx domains to allow for the massive quantities of porn on the internet that we all so desperately need ?
All they'll need to do to catch people is monitor traffic over port 443 or the ports commonly used by this application or just simply detect the encrypted traffic. Then its just a matter of logging IP's.
If something is using SSL to communicate with a site that is not a major site, such as ebay, hotmail, gmail etc... then bingo they have a candidate for interrogation, send the boys round, seize his computer check his and check it for banned content or any history of accessing banned content... or maybe just throw him into jail without checking whether he's guilty or not (this is a totalitarian state we're talking about here, we do need proof to send people away forever).
It's a nice quest, but I just hope these guys don't give users of their software any false security, any mistake made here might end up getting someone imprisoned, tortured or just plain killed. I hope these guys come to terms with that reality and not let their ego's overcome their ability to do anything about this situation.
Also on another note.... As someone who has actually surfed the net behind one of these firewalls in the Middle East I can say that most of the content banned is related to porn. Nearly all the content that is banned is not political. I don't know about China, but I wouldn't mind betting it's the same.
I think the whole thing is ridiculous. People don't want to download their own media players and browsers.... especially when they have to pay for them. Windows XP doesn't come with DVD decoders by default you have to go off and buy a codec and install it. Just last night I wanted to watch a DVD in bed with the gf, so I spent 10 mins searching for a free codec for windows media player to enable me to play dvd's on my computer, I finally gave up and downloaded VLC, so now I have two media players installed. I don't want two media players, I just want one that plays everything under the sun, no hassles.
This won't be the case with Windows Vista... and hurrah for that, I DONT WANT the freedom to have to spend more money on functionality that should be stock standard.
All it will do is to allow an OS competing against Microsoft (that isn't constrained by litigation) to bundle all the features PEOPLE WANT, and take the place of Windows. So instead of Microsoft, we'll have some other company in the exact same position as Microsoft. So whats the point of this other than to punish Microsoft and anyone out there who actually prefers Windows to Linux or OS-X ?
This is a stupid argument. If it were true, the pocket pc market would have died long ago. Alot of people love pocket pc's so, no my friend I'd say the biggest problem is really the crappy handwritting recognition on this device. I bet those poor buggers had to write their own support for it. If they weren't nokia and could use Windows CE I'm sure this wouldn't have featured as an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll find most of these operators who create malware are ahead of the game and have structured their business such that it operates from a country where it is beyond litigation.
However in cases like this where the malware is being delivered on mass by a third party who happens to be a large very well respected operation there is definitely a chance for litigation of some sort. I think when you operate a domain you have a responsibility for the content that is delivered when a user browsers to your site. I don't think it should matter if your site has only relayed content from another domain, ultimately you should be responsible for the service you provide.
In a case like this where hundreds of thousands of people may have incurred damage to their systems, and lost time in cleaning up their systems, the damages could be quite large. You're talking about people's time and potential loss of valuable business data and/or personal items. In this circumstance people would be well entitled to compensation for their loss.
I don't think it'll be long before a mainstream operator runs into a class action suit as a result of negligence in assuring the content sent via their site is safe.
I'll second that, I ran into this almost a year ago, I too wrote an email to complain and received no reply.
. jsp?docid=2006-012017-0346-99. I think it's a very serious matter to allow Errorsafe to inject malcious script into your sites exposing visitors to your domain to such a deceptive incidious organisation whose business is to cause damage and monetary loss to those unwary enough to fall pray to it. I could go so far to say that whilst Errorsafe may be beyond the law, you may actually be in part (or fully) liable for any damages caused by Errorsafe to those visiting your domain.
After a long holiday from Dilbert coincidently I visited Dilbert again just last night and to my shock got an even more agreesive form of attack which left me scanning my hard disk for a good two hours afterwards just to make sure that they hadn't used a browser exploit to infect my machine.
I emailed United Media again last night here's a copy...
I think you should know that one of the banner ads that is occasionally appearing when you visit the Dilbert comic website redirects you from the Dilbert site to another domain - www.errorsafe.com. Where upon you are continuously assaulted with popups attempting to get you to install Errorsafe's spyware software. This software poses as an antivirus application but in actual fact deliberately installs malware on to your machine, and then attempts to get you to pay money to remove it. This is basically outright fraud and blackmail, I have no doubt you'll find this company operates in a country beyond reach of litigation.
Errorsafe is notorious and well documented by numerous anti-spyware companies such as symnatec http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup
This has been going on for quite some time now (at least a year). I'm really quite shocked that such a high profile site such as United Media would be linked to such criminal activity.
In short, I really think it would be in your best interest to make sure that Errorsafe is not permitted to "advertise" on any of your websites.
Michael
I've since added this domain (www.errorsafe.com) to the list of no go domains for my browser to ensure that my computer never attempts to load content from that domain again. Can anyone suggest a reliable site that you might find a list of domains that a security conscious user should put in their ban list ?
Having some sort of service that updates a list of banned domains on your system would be a great way to nullify these sorts of attacks. However I guess this could become an extremely dangerous tool for an authority wanting to censor the web.
Something to get at even the most stubborn nasal hairs.
Woohoo.... as in no more advertising. No more people trying to track and know everything about you in the quest to sell you something. I don't think there's a chance that this will actually stop google or someone else from doing their best to invade the privacy of every living soul on the planet.
Big brother is coming, and he's in advertising.
Don't worry about your advertising dollars, there's millions of people (some of them working for google). Thinking up ways to track, record and learn everything there is to know to someone and have absolute control over what business's get utilise or take advantage of this information.
However watchout ! Once someone actually cracks this and comes up with the model of all advertising models, that company will have the power to help you destroy your competition, or the power to help your competition destroy you and you can bet they'll take the highest bid (which will be very high indeed).
All you people who think Google is so neat.... well... you need to think a little more.
Wooohooo !!
...will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted
An amazing bit of research; only out by 36 hours.
True finding the right resources is hard. But it's not impossible. I think even if your team does not have the right people, and you don't have the experience, long term it is far better for a company to cultivate it's own product development process. I think if you're in there for the long hall you want to be continuously improving your company's software development process. There's enough help out on the web that will enable you to grow your staff and help get your company heading in the right direction on the CMM scale.
Always always always at the start of a project get feedback from clients and management as early as you possibly can. Never wait till you're at a stage where weeks of time has gone into something before giving anyone a glimpse of it. At the start of a project you need to stay small and agile. As your project grows larger you lose your agility, this is why its so important that the open slather changes occur when the project is still at the small phase.
I agreee... pair programming is definitely far better than code reviews. Pair programming is in fact like an on the fly code review. The "hurt feelings" come from people getting too attached to code they have written, when pair programming the attachment never has a chance to take hold as the changes that would come with a review are often made on the fly.
In a situation where you are willing to throw unlimited resources at a software feature to get it implemented, you would choose pair programming every time. Unless the code is really critical further code reviews of pair programmed code are probably not necessary, and the changes that come out of a review are most likely going to be far less substantial than what may have eventuated from a single developer's work.
However this is not to say I would always use pair programming in preference to code reviews. On a tight budget with less time pressure you may consider code reviews, as it takes far less man hours to review code than it does with pair programming. In a review you tend to skim much of the hum drum (but necessary) parts of the code and focus on where the real meat of the problem is dealt with, to attain how it has been tackled or if it has been implemented as per the design.
I would estimate pair programming takes up about 80% more man hours than code reviews, excluding the odd result of a code review where a developer really makes a major stuff up and a complete re-write is required.
I would tend to use pair programming in two situations: when training a junior up (till they become productive on their own) or on critical jobs (ie jobs on the critical path, that if not completed on time will delay other jobs or tasks) and code reviews for everything else. As for "hurt feelings" with code reviews; get over it; get professional.
You are speaking from a service related software development experience. It's quite a different dynamic when you are producing software for a market as opposed to a particular client. Lost market opportunities offer significantly more pressure than the prospect of losing a single customer. I think it's far easier to resist schedule pressures when there's a single customer at risk. Markets tend to be far more ruthless and less forgiving, schedule blow outs can lead to death for a business, when the market is lost to a competitor.
I think there is a minimum time a software project can be completed in, and in large projects achieving this minimum time, almost never would involve the omission of documentation and employing methodologies.
If this minimum time is greater than the time available then compromises need to be made with either your software development process or your business goals.
The key to success in the software business is to be pragmatic, to have the right balance between software and business requirements. Development techniques such as Extreme Programming and methodologies such as UML are very flexible and can add value with even a minimal amount of time spent employing them.
"...take the time to do things right...."
It's this notion that not going off and making a total ass over end cock up of a project, and "taking the time to do things right" that is really the problem with allot of developers, and managers attitude to software development.
The quickest way to get a project done is to do it right ONCE! Not five times badly. At developer meetings I've often heard managers or developers call UML and other methodologies a waste of time or unnecessary, it always flabbergasts me to hear such ignorance.
I've been in a situation where an (un)manager told me "We don't have the time to do document and do things the right way", my response was "No, we don't have the time not to do things the right way". We only had 6-8 months to get a large project out, with four programmers, a business analyst and two DBA's. I was told I wasn't to spend time in UML and documentation land, and you know what, I ignored him and spent 3-5 days creating high level class diagrams and interaction diagrams, the core of which lasted us through the entire project.
Any project that you forecast is going to take longer than 3 man weeks ie 120 hours needs some sort of design in place to ensure that the major architectural constructs are already decided before coding takes place.
The key to employing methodologies in projects successfully is unfortunately experience. It takes experience to use methodologies successfully, it takes experience to create good designs for applications and to judge when a design has become mature enough to allow development to commence without the risk of major refactoring later on in the project.
It does in fact take time to acquire this experience (years in fact), but it does not take time to employ this experience once it has been acquired. If you feel like your project needs some sort of methodologies in place, but "you don't have the time", the answer is simple, it's not that you don't have the time, you don't have the right personnel. It's true if you have no one with the experience of delivering the architecture required in a professional and timely manner then taking on methodologies new to everyone on the team is going to take time and lots of it. A good manager however will make sure that the project is correctly resourced.
So ... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?
It's not like they have done nothing, they have actually gone to some expense to comply with many of the anti-trust rulings, and information they have been required to produce is available, just not to the satisfaction of the EU's technical/legal advisors.
You can find info on Microsoft's Communication Protocols here
There's also a program which gives access to source code specifically trying to appease the EU here
I mean it's pretty hard for Microsoft to defend themselves in this circumstance, where the group they are in dispute with is also the judge and jury.
Have you thought perhaps maybe just maybe the EU has decided it'd like a slice of Microsoft war chest and has just decided it'll make up whatever excuse and take some.
And there's probably thousands more web sites like this containing e-books. I think this illustrates that there's absolutely no need for an entity such as google to create a central repository of such resources. What's needed are open document standards and a better system for indexing and searching for these documents on the internet. I think the prospect of an entity such as google having a monopoly or attempting to gain a monopoly over such resources is really quite frightening.
There you have it - three people with symptoms
It's seven people over the space of 10 years with 5 of those people having been diagnosed in the last month.... which strangely coincides with the implementation of Telstra's 3G network, which of course would require an increase in the power and radiation coming from the towers.
So when your ass in on fire, do you run for water when you smell the smoke ? Or do you wait until you can feel the flames ? Maybe you should go work there for a few years and show us how much of a non-issue this is.
Actually... it's two mobile phone towers.
If you can come up with a way to effectively force 'red light business' to stay within their designated TLD, I'd be all for it. Really
.com or .net domains. Plus alot those operating porn sites would know, that net nanny is not going to stop a teen figuring out how to access .xxx domain porn if they really want to.
It wouldn't need enforcing. You vastly over rate the intelligence of those operating porn systems and those using them. Operators would go for the xxx domain simply because it would be good for cooler sounding domain names, and users would go for xxx as it's easier to associate with porn than
They could just use Psiphon to get access, or some other trick, I think it'll be another couple of generations before any parent has a hope of out-teching their children and/or their children's friends.
This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the .xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves
Your argument is based on people running porn sites having a brain.... I know for a fact they don't. I guarentee that most of these guys would go for xxx as it makes their domain name sound really cool and easier to find for the half-wits using their sites.
That's not 100% accurate.
.xxx.us.
.XXX domain then there would have been a rush and not everyone would have been able to register the domain they wanted for their porn site..... And the problem with this would be ?!! We might have less porn on the internet ?
.xxx domains to allow for the massive quantities of porn on the internet that we all so desperately need ?
How diplomatic of you. Come on !!! He's completely and utterly wrong as in his statement is 0% accurate
Yeah, there would be a rush. But that's just evidence that the TLD system is busted. There wouldn't be as big a rush if it was
Hmmm so you're saying if they had made the
So you're advocating every country allow the registering of
OOpps.. here
Details of this project can be found here
They don't need to decrypt anything....
All they'll need to do to catch people is monitor traffic over port 443 or the ports commonly used by this application or just simply detect the encrypted traffic. Then its just a matter of logging IP's.
If something is using SSL to communicate with a site that is not a major site, such as ebay, hotmail, gmail etc... then bingo they have a candidate for interrogation, send the boys round, seize his computer check his and check it for banned content or any history of accessing banned content... or maybe just throw him into jail without checking whether he's guilty or not (this is a totalitarian state we're talking about here, we do need proof to send people away forever).
It's a nice quest, but I just hope these guys don't give users of their software any false security, any mistake made here might end up getting someone imprisoned, tortured or just plain killed. I hope these guys come to terms with that reality and not let their ego's overcome their ability to do anything about this situation.
Also on another note.... As someone who has actually surfed the net behind one of these firewalls in the Middle East I can say that most of the content banned is related to porn. Nearly all the content that is banned is not political. I don't know about China, but I wouldn't mind betting it's the same.
I'll second that.
I think the whole thing is ridiculous. People don't want to download their own media players and browsers.... especially when they have to pay for them. Windows XP doesn't come with DVD decoders by default you have to go off and buy a codec and install it. Just last night I wanted to watch a DVD in bed with the gf, so I spent 10 mins searching for a free codec for windows media player to enable me to play dvd's on my computer, I finally gave up and downloaded VLC, so now I have two media players installed. I don't want two media players, I just want one that plays everything under the sun, no hassles. This won't be the case with Windows Vista... and hurrah for that, I DONT WANT the freedom to have to spend more money on functionality that should be stock standard. All it will do is to allow an OS competing against Microsoft (that isn't constrained by litigation) to bundle all the features PEOPLE WANT, and take the place of Windows. So instead of Microsoft, we'll have some other company in the exact same position as Microsoft. So whats the point of this other than to punish Microsoft and anyone out there who actually prefers Windows to Linux or OS-X ?
This is a stupid argument. If it were true, the pocket pc market would have died long ago. Alot of people love pocket pc's so, no my friend I'd say the biggest problem is really the crappy handwritting recognition on this device. I bet those poor buggers had to write their own support for it. If they weren't nokia and could use Windows CE I'm sure this wouldn't have featured as an issue.