The idea that a professional does equally fast work, regardless of their relationship with their client, is complete nonsense. Good rapport helps get the specificatons more precise and at the right level of detail, makes communicating about needs more efficient, etc. It also allows each side to trade-off features gracefully, to trade-off faster completion times or less hardware investment or better security, without having extensive meetings and wasting management time making the deals among
The idea that the relationship with the client, in this case another department, is like the idea than a manager can manage anything, even if they know nothing about the service being managed. It's a complete fiction made up by someone who doesn't actually do the work.
If work can tolereate it, do it at work because you can test out features that work is not ready for yet. New OS's, webserver software, new content management features, new databases, they can all be tested out on a work-sponsored playspace in a way that would never be permitted on a core server. Then you can turn around and integrate those features into your work services with some practice and some debugging in hand before possibly slapping down a core server.
True, potholes are exactly what the foam failuers seem to match. One solution is to never let the tanks thaw. Another is to simply use the tanks as they were originally designed, as launchable raw materials for space construction so you never use the same one twice, but that ran into fascinating budget and design problems which look insoluble.
The solution is to scrap the Space Shuttle: it was a badly designed source of boondoggles, and there are a half-dozen solid industrial projects to replace it, such as the X-Project awarded Phoenix, that are much better ideas and will cost less in every budget but the first 2 years.
Signing of digital code is already in the works: take a good look at the "trusted computing initiative", formerly called Palladium. While it has some very real benefits for software security, it's also easy to use it to restrict legal and reasonable behavior. These as using debugging tools on software, or being able to read a file with software that is not Palladium authorized in order to be able to copy bits of its content for quoting, or even to make a backup copy of a CD or DVD.
Congratulations, you've discovered several of the little men behind the curtains. In particular, the "new printer technology" is in order to break CUPS and Samba based compatibility Windows printing. I'm sure they'll "embrace and extend" parts of them, but I'm also convinced they'll deliberately make them incompatible with existing tools in the process.
Second, the "user mode drivers" have a rather obvious use: coupled with the plans for "trusted computing" style authentication of software, they provide a robust means for digital rights management of both software and hardware. The plan seems to be to require authenticated software to access CD and DVD readers and burners. And by integrating it in at the trusted computing driver level, the drives can be designed so that they cannot be used without the vendor's signed software, disabling all access to the content except with the vendor's approved software.
It's a logical consequence of the "trusted computing" approach to software, and you'd better believe that it's being pushed for if not already directly integrated into Vista.
Joss kills important characters. It helps keep his material from getting stale: and he also has budget and screen time limitations to deal with. As wonderful as Wash is, Wash was a mature character: our little ax-killer, however, has some very powerful plot development as her thighs and bust and beautiful skin get more exposure.
Excuse me, did I say that? I meant character and emotional range, of course.
Yes, the work inside your own head can be a trade secret. Please go look it up: a casual description of trade secret laws can be found at http://www.marketingtoday.com/legal/tradesec.htm. And please read the contract of someone who gets paid for writing software, even 20 years ago. There's plenty of contractual law involving trade secrets and "the knowledge inside your own head".
There's also considerable evidence that David Cutler and his merry gang of software pirates stole exactly that: trade secrets and copyrighted code. Take a good look at the memory management of NT for examples. Re-compiling your old code, and reproducing the same trade secret knowledge for another company is in fact illegal, especially if it's a violation of your employee contract. David Cutler violated his contract, he hired his old employees to help him do it, and Microsoft profited directly from it. The extent to which his Microsoft supervisors knew of the violation is an interesting question, but they sure didn't hire him from DEC for his good looks or personal charm.
Intel's theft of Alpha technologies to use in the Pentium is a bit different. While there were many blatant violations of patents, there were also apparently a number of thefts of trade secret knowledge of exactly how to make registers work that fast: separate lawsuits were filed, and they're less public, because neither side wanted to expose core trade secrets in court if they could avoid it.
It looks like you've never actualy been paid for code you've written, or you're so young you don't remember a time before DEC's development teams had already been reaped by corporate thieves. The company that pays you for the code normally owns it: it's released under whatever copyrights they use, or that are in your contract. David Cutler was a core author of VMS: DEC-owned, copyrighted code and trade secrets that he developed in his time at DEC turned up throughout the NT core when he and his merry gang of former DEC developers wrote it into NT. They didn't have time to develop it from scratch for Microsoft: they stole it wholesale from Cutler and his team's old work at DEC. The lawsuits were nasty: a fast Google search on "DEC David Cutler NT lawsuit" will give you plenty of reasonable references.
Second, there are literally hundreds of lawsuits and court precedents and clear law that say that patents, trade secrets, and copyrighted code are not "your knowledge to do whatever you want with". Cutler had at least trade secrets and copyrighted code he used wholesale in NT: take a look at the old memory management code and do a side-by-side comparison for examples of the violations.
Last, there was plenty of hardware design knowledge and architectural knowledge stolen from DEC and used in the Pentium series: DEC sued over at least 10 *distinct* patent infringements in Pentium development. It's hard to know how much money they got: DEC's policy of settling where possible instead of nailing thieves to the wall turned out to be shortsighted when Microsoft and Intel managed to steal such core technologies, make large amounts of money with them by integrating them into low-end systems, and impoverish DEC so badly that their core people retired and they couldn't be replaced.
I think you can basically ignore the Alpha developers: after the the theft of Alpha technologies for the Pentium, and the theft of David Cutler's old work for developing NT (which David Cutler himself took illegally along with his merry band of software pirates he hired from DEC), repeating the Alpha work for a non-Intel chipset would have been playing to Intel's and Window's strengths.
Unless the old Alpha developers in a cooperative environment were able to sidestep old Alpha issues, or completely avoid the compromises Intel made to stuff Alpha technologies into the Pentium, then I think the Alpha developers were not in a good position to contribute much to such an endeaver.
And the legs you'd wind up with doing 50 miles/day on a bike might help you pick up sweet young things who prize long, lean muscle. I've actually gotten a number of a sweet young thing by riding up to her car where she was having trouble, applying some leverage and leg muscles to the stuck lug nut she couldn't get off the car, then biking away when done. It made me wish I wanted to date sweet young things.
I do want to date them, but my kids would make fun of me and have me put in a home to prevent me giving away their inheritance. What inheritance? That box of old hardware in the garage and their tuition is where it all went!
No, they're really not all equally capable of long uptime. The fact that you laud 9 months as a long time for Windows is an example. Windows machines, in a network exposed position, are running a lot of undesired and insecure services by default. A Linux distribution may be running a few undesired ones, but securing them and removing them is vastly easier. So is the upgrade process, which almost never requires a system reboot for Linux.
I've been through updating a Win2003 Server box and a recent RedHat Advanced Server 4.1 box lately: both required core updates, but the Windows box required no less than 4 reboots to get all the updates. The RedHat had one optional update for a new kernel, and I didn't have to reboot it if I wanted to stay with the old kernel. (I did want the new kernel, so that was one reboot.)
The whole "I must be rebooted to install updates" thing really imperils Windows servers.
What you say is good advice for corporate firewall users, as well. Just because you have a firewall does not make you safe: once they've found one hole, because of some vulnerable service or worm-implanting webpage they happened to visit, your local, unpatched machines are just unwrapped chocolates from the bottom of the box.
Being on the bottom of the box is no defense against a really fat choc-oholic eating you when they just open up and pour the box down their gullet: and that is exactly how the zombie-installers and email worm authors act. Their better tools don't bother to pick the best candidates, they just nail everyone.
119 18-hour days over 2.5 years? Sheesh, it sounds like anyplace I've worked in the last 20 years. Mind you, I've either gotten compensation time, excellent salary, or incredible satisfaction in return for it.
How do you think schoolteachers work? And why do you think they need the 3-month summer, to recover or to work at something that pays them what they're worth?
I actually know programmers who benefit from having numerous screen windows open, and help desk workers who may have dozens open if they have the screen real estate. A 24" screen is not unreasonable for that sort of work. And the less than $500 price tag is not surprising for a big customer's discounts, such as a state agency, or for a refurbished monitor.
$500 is often a threshold price for purchase orders: more than that makes people think harder, or have to get the purchase approved, so I'm not surprised if one company makes screens like that. Pricewatch shows several vendors with 24" screens that might fit that description.
Microsoft should be particularly cautious, even accountable, for supporting Chinese repression for several reasons.
1: They run several large network services, such as Hotmail and MSN, that can be used to track user behavior and messages.
2: They insist on embedding a huge amount of tracking information in their software, ostensibly for technical reasons, but it can be and has been used to reveal editing histories or what machine was used to create MS-Word documents. Such tracking is frequent in Microsoft software, and is far too easily abused. Little consideration is actually given to user privacy or frequently security in writing Microsoft software. They're allegedly getting better, but it's still a problem.
3: They're the main force behind the "Trusted Computing" initiative, an attempt to create motherboard-level encryption/decryption/authentication of software and documents. Such features are far too easily used to install backdoors for governments, identify otherwise anonymous documents by forcing the software to record identifying information, and due to the closed nature of Microsoft, allow governmental agencies far too much access to private citizen's documents.
The US has just been revealed as using warrantless wiretaps on its own citizens: Microsoft can take a lead in protecting its clients from such misbehavior, or can as usual say "we wouldn't misuse such power!" and cooperate in any tracking efforts it wishes behind the scenes.
The small amount of spam you see also means that GMail and Thunderbird are having to do more and more shoveling for you. There is almost nothing in place now that actually discourages spam: the filters merely decrease its effectiveness in reaching customers. But the cost of sending spam is so low, and its normally modest rewards enough, that it's still believed to be profitable, especially for thieves who don't face the costs of really doing business.
So the amount of spam has been continuing to increase, and will continue to increase. The problem is a social and economic one: there is far too little actual cost for spamming. And there's no cost to the ISP's for allowing spam, only for delivering it, so they continue to sell accounts to the spammers. Take a good look at what happened with Cyberpromo and agis.net for an example of how and why an ISP will continue to sell connectivity to a known spammer.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 1
You mean dancing and singing ads like www.doonesbury.com, right? That one is extremely annoying. Its volume makes the site unsuitable for viewing on a work break, because that music is so irritating.
I'm going to ignore the difficulties of setting up a micropayment, and focus on the most obvious failure of it: mail-sender security. Given the stunning lack of security on most mail servers, even a properly implemented micro-payment system means that the casual desktop or casual mail server must be secure lest the existing spam zombie installers simply take over the machines and use them to send their own spam.
Of course you're not Sherlock Holmes! He wrote "The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture", after his retirement to Sussex Downs, and tended to ignore physics in favor of direct observation of his surroundings.
Because ball bearings are a bitch and a half to maintain from organic tissue: there are very few free-spinning joints in nature because making them smooth, round enough to spin, and not attached between the "wheel" and the "axle" to that it can actually spin is amazingly difficult.
A few animals roll effectively for short distances, but it's terribly inefficient because the you have to get the angular thrust from somewhere: if you're going to bother to have legs, why not just walk with them?
Modern Christian re-thinking of Biblical stories is not the point. The point is that in the original text, there's a lot of extremely naughty stories that, read as they exist, are sexually wicked and even gratuitously titillating. Haven't you actually read the Song of Solomon and its discussion of women's breasts as tasty fruit? If that's not porn, what is?
Txiasaeia wrote:
Porn is a God-given right? I missed that lesson in Sunday school...
The pursuit of happiness is described that way in the US Constitution. Then there's the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and its protections for free speech.
For Biblical references, I suspect your Sunday school left out all the good bits. Given that Lot thought God would be thrilled for Lot to send his daughters out to the crowd to keep the rowdy neighbors from bothering his angelic neighbors, the wife-stealing, husband-murdering David was the anointed of God, the mother of Christ was an unwed teenager already engaged to somebody else when she got pregnant, and the wild adventures of Onan who was supposed to commit adultery against his own wife by impregnating his dead brother's wife, and you get one heck of a lot of porn in the Bible itself.
I'm happy to see the massive Chiinese distributors shut down, but not because they sell porn. It's because they spam relentlessly. I'd be delighted to see clear laws in China and elsewhere forbidding that, and those laws enforced.
If they didn't spam so relentlessly, what people do on their own time with their own bandwidth would be vastly less bothersome to the rest of us. As it is, if I turn spam filters off, I get roughly one-in-five of my email messages as sexual spam. And a bunch of those try their best to auto-pop-up websites that refuse to allow the page to close, leading to some embarassing moments at work and forcing me to shut down my browser entirely and losing work.
Secunia? I haven't tried working with them. Are they more responsive than CERT? Do you have any concrete reason to think that the same over-cooperation in concealing known vulnerabilities that the vendor hasn't fixed found at CERT doesn't apply as well to Secuina? It might not be the case there: I'm actually curious.
IIS, based on the actual code and discovered vulnerabilities, may be more secure. But you can't base that conclusion on a mere shortage of published reports, especially with factors such as I described for CERT. And some of them will apply to Secunia, even if they don't engage in the passive concealment of known vulnerabilities to protect their vendor relationship in which CERT engages. Factors such as deliberate under-reporting by victimized sites to avoid revealing vulnerabilities will apply to Secunia, even if they're good.
In fact, to get access to source to write security products such as Secunia sells, they may be under an NDA that would prohibit them ever revealing such security flaws!
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The idea that a professional does equally fast work, regardless of their relationship with their client, is complete nonsense. Good rapport helps get the specificatons more precise and at the right level of detail, makes communicating about needs more efficient, etc. It also allows each side to trade-off features gracefully, to trade-off faster completion times or less hardware investment or better security, without having extensive meetings and wasting management time making the deals among
The idea that the relationship with the client, in this case another department, is like the idea than a manager can manage anything, even if they know nothing about the service being managed. It's a complete fiction made up by someone who doesn't actually do the work.
If work can tolereate it, do it at work because you can test out features that work is not ready for yet. New OS's, webserver software, new content management features, new databases, they can all be tested out on a work-sponsored playspace in a way that would never be permitted on a core server. Then you can turn around and integrate those features into your work services with some practice and some debugging in hand before possibly slapping down a core server.
True, potholes are exactly what the foam failuers seem to match. One solution is to never let the tanks thaw. Another is to simply use the tanks as they were originally designed, as launchable raw materials for space construction so you never use the same one twice, but that ran into fascinating budget and design problems which look insoluble.
The solution is to scrap the Space Shuttle: it was a badly designed source of boondoggles, and there are a half-dozen solid industrial projects to replace it, such as the X-Project awarded Phoenix, that are much better ideas and will cost less in every budget but the first 2 years.
Signing of digital code is already in the works: take a good look at the "trusted computing initiative", formerly called Palladium. While it has some very real benefits for software security, it's also easy to use it to restrict legal and reasonable behavior. These as using debugging tools on software, or being able to read a file with software that is not Palladium authorized in order to be able to copy bits of its content for quoting, or even to make a backup copy of a CD or DVD.
Congratulations, you've discovered several of the little men behind the curtains. In particular, the "new printer technology" is in order to break CUPS and Samba based compatibility Windows printing. I'm sure they'll "embrace and extend" parts of them, but I'm also convinced they'll deliberately make them incompatible with existing tools in the process.
Second, the "user mode drivers" have a rather obvious use: coupled with the plans for "trusted computing" style authentication of software, they provide a robust means for digital rights management of both software and hardware. The plan seems to be to require authenticated software to access CD and DVD readers and burners. And by integrating it in at the trusted computing driver level, the drives can be designed so that they cannot be used without the vendor's signed software, disabling all access to the content except with the vendor's approved software.
It's a logical consequence of the "trusted computing" approach to software, and you'd better believe that it's being pushed for if not already directly integrated into Vista.
Joss kills important characters. It helps keep his material from getting stale: and he also has budget and screen time limitations to deal with. As wonderful as Wash is, Wash was a mature character: our little ax-killer, however, has some very powerful plot development as her thighs and bust and beautiful skin get more exposure.
Excuse me, did I say that? I meant character and emotional range, of course.
Yes, the work inside your own head can be a trade secret. Please go look it up: a casual description of trade secret laws can be found at http://www.marketingtoday.com/legal/tradesec.htm. And please read the contract of someone who gets paid for writing software, even 20 years ago. There's plenty of contractual law involving trade secrets and "the knowledge inside your own head".
There's also considerable evidence that David Cutler and his merry gang of software pirates stole exactly that: trade secrets and copyrighted code. Take a good look at the memory management of NT for examples. Re-compiling your old code, and reproducing the same trade secret knowledge for another company is in fact illegal, especially if it's a violation of your employee contract. David Cutler violated his contract, he hired his old employees to help him do it, and Microsoft profited directly from it. The extent to which his Microsoft supervisors knew of the violation is an interesting question, but they sure didn't hire him from DEC for his good looks or personal charm.
Intel's theft of Alpha technologies to use in the Pentium is a bit different. While there were many blatant violations of patents, there were also apparently a number of thefts of trade secret knowledge of exactly how to make registers work that fast: separate lawsuits were filed, and they're less public, because neither side wanted to expose core trade secrets in court if they could avoid it.
It looks like you've never actualy been paid for code you've written, or you're so young you don't remember a time before DEC's development teams had already been reaped by corporate thieves. The company that pays you for the code normally owns it: it's released under whatever copyrights they use, or that are in your contract. David Cutler was a core author of VMS: DEC-owned, copyrighted code and trade secrets that he developed in his time at DEC turned up throughout the NT core when he and his merry gang of former DEC developers wrote it into NT. They didn't have time to develop it from scratch for Microsoft: they stole it wholesale from Cutler and his team's old work at DEC. The lawsuits were nasty: a fast Google search on "DEC David Cutler NT lawsuit" will give you plenty of reasonable references.
Second, there are literally hundreds of lawsuits and court precedents and clear law that say that patents, trade secrets, and copyrighted code are not "your knowledge to do whatever you want with". Cutler had at least trade secrets and copyrighted code he used wholesale in NT: take a look at the old memory management code and do a side-by-side comparison for examples of the violations.
Last, there was plenty of hardware design knowledge and architectural knowledge stolen from DEC and used in the Pentium series: DEC sued over at least 10 *distinct* patent infringements in Pentium development. It's hard to know how much money they got: DEC's policy of settling where possible instead of nailing thieves to the wall turned out to be shortsighted when Microsoft and Intel managed to steal such core technologies, make large amounts of money with them by integrating them into low-end systems, and impoverish DEC so badly that their core people retired and they couldn't be replaced.
I think you can basically ignore the Alpha developers: after the the theft of Alpha technologies for the Pentium, and the theft of David Cutler's old work for developing NT (which David Cutler himself took illegally along with his merry band of software pirates he hired from DEC), repeating the Alpha work for a non-Intel chipset would have been playing to Intel's and Window's strengths.
Unless the old Alpha developers in a cooperative environment were able to sidestep old Alpha issues, or completely avoid the compromises Intel made to stuff Alpha technologies into the Pentium, then I think the Alpha developers were not in a good position to contribute much to such an endeaver.
And the legs you'd wind up with doing 50 miles/day on a bike might help you pick up sweet young things who prize long, lean muscle. I've actually gotten a number of a sweet young thing by riding up to her car where she was having trouble, applying some leverage and leg muscles to the stuck lug nut she couldn't get off the car, then biking away when done. It made me wish I wanted to date sweet young things.
I do want to date them, but my kids would make fun of me and have me put in a home to prevent me giving away their inheritance. What inheritance? That box of old hardware in the garage and their tuition is where it all went!
No, they're really not all equally capable of long uptime. The fact that you laud 9 months as a long time for Windows is an example. Windows machines, in a network exposed position, are running a lot of undesired and insecure services by default. A Linux distribution may be running a few undesired ones, but securing them and removing them is vastly easier. So is the upgrade process, which almost never requires a system reboot for Linux.
I've been through updating a Win2003 Server box and a recent RedHat Advanced Server 4.1 box lately: both required core updates, but the Windows box required no less than 4 reboots to get all the updates. The RedHat had one optional update for a new kernel, and I didn't have to reboot it if I wanted to stay with the old kernel. (I did want the new kernel, so that was one reboot.)
The whole "I must be rebooted to install updates" thing really imperils Windows servers.
What you say is good advice for corporate firewall users, as well. Just because you have a firewall does not make you safe: once they've found one hole, because of some vulnerable service or worm-implanting webpage they happened to visit, your local, unpatched machines are just unwrapped chocolates from the bottom of the box.
Being on the bottom of the box is no defense against a really fat choc-oholic eating you when they just open up and pour the box down their gullet: and that is exactly how the zombie-installers and email worm authors act. Their better tools don't bother to pick the best candidates, they just nail everyone.
119 18-hour days over 2.5 years? Sheesh, it sounds like anyplace I've worked in the last 20 years. Mind you, I've either gotten compensation time, excellent salary, or incredible satisfaction in return for it.
How do you think schoolteachers work? And why do you think they need the 3-month summer, to recover or to work at something that pays them what they're worth?
I actually know programmers who benefit from having numerous screen windows open, and help desk workers who may have dozens open if they have the screen real estate. A 24" screen is not unreasonable for that sort of work. And the less than $500 price tag is not surprising for a big customer's discounts, such as a state agency, or for a refurbished monitor.
$500 is often a threshold price for purchase orders: more than that makes people think harder, or have to get the purchase approved, so I'm not surprised if one company makes screens like that. Pricewatch shows several vendors with 24" screens that might fit that description.
Microsoft should be particularly cautious, even accountable, for supporting Chinese repression for several reasons.
1: They run several large network services, such as Hotmail and MSN, that can be used to track user behavior and messages.
2: They insist on embedding a huge amount of tracking information in their software, ostensibly for technical reasons, but it can be and has been used to reveal editing histories or what machine was used to create MS-Word documents. Such tracking is frequent in Microsoft software, and is far too easily abused. Little consideration is actually given to user privacy or frequently security in writing Microsoft software. They're allegedly getting better, but it's still a problem.
3: They're the main force behind the "Trusted Computing" initiative, an attempt to create motherboard-level encryption/decryption/authentication of software and documents. Such features are far too easily used to install backdoors for governments, identify otherwise anonymous documents by forcing the software to record identifying information, and due to the closed nature of Microsoft, allow governmental agencies far too much access to private citizen's documents.
The US has just been revealed as using warrantless wiretaps on its own citizens: Microsoft can take a lead in protecting its clients from such misbehavior, or can as usual say "we wouldn't misuse such power!" and cooperate in any tracking efforts it wishes behind the scenes.
The small amount of spam you see also means that GMail and Thunderbird are having to do more and more shoveling for you. There is almost nothing in place now that actually discourages spam: the filters merely decrease its effectiveness in reaching customers. But the cost of sending spam is so low, and its normally modest rewards enough, that it's still believed to be profitable, especially for thieves who don't face the costs of really doing business.
So the amount of spam has been continuing to increase, and will continue to increase. The problem is a social and economic one: there is far too little actual cost for spamming. And there's no cost to the ISP's for allowing spam, only for delivering it, so they continue to sell accounts to the spammers. Take a good look at what happened with Cyberpromo and agis.net for an example of how and why an ISP will continue to sell connectivity to a known spammer.
You mean dancing and singing ads like www.doonesbury.com, right? That one is extremely annoying. Its volume makes the site unsuitable for viewing on a work break, because that music is so irritating.
I'm going to ignore the difficulties of setting up a micropayment, and focus on the most obvious failure of it: mail-sender security. Given the stunning lack of security on most mail servers, even a properly implemented micro-payment system means that the casual desktop or casual mail server must be secure lest the existing spam zombie installers simply take over the machines and use them to send their own spam.
Which is better stated as "do not meddle in the affiars of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light."
Of course you're not Sherlock Holmes! He wrote "The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture", after his retirement to Sussex Downs, and tended to ignore physics in favor of direct observation of his surroundings.
Because ball bearings are a bitch and a half to maintain from organic tissue: there are very few free-spinning joints in nature because making them smooth, round enough to spin, and not attached between the "wheel" and the "axle" to that it can actually spin is amazingly difficult.
A few animals roll effectively for short distances, but it's terribly inefficient because the you have to get the angular thrust from somewhere: if you're going to bother to have legs, why not just walk with them?
Modern Christian re-thinking of Biblical stories is not the point. The point is that in the original text, there's a lot of extremely naughty stories that, read as they exist, are sexually wicked and even gratuitously titillating. Haven't you actually read the Song of Solomon and its discussion of women's breasts as tasty fruit? If that's not porn, what is?
Txiasaeia wrote:
Porn is a God-given right? I missed that lesson in Sunday school...
The pursuit of happiness is described that way in the US Constitution. Then there's the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and its protections for free speech.
For Biblical references, I suspect your Sunday school left out all the good bits. Given that Lot thought God would be thrilled for Lot to send his daughters out to the crowd to keep the rowdy neighbors from bothering his angelic neighbors, the wife-stealing, husband-murdering David was the anointed of God, the mother of Christ was an unwed teenager already engaged to somebody else when she got pregnant, and the wild adventures of Onan who was supposed to commit adultery against his own wife by impregnating his dead brother's wife, and you get one heck of a lot of porn in the Bible itself.
I'm happy to see the massive Chiinese distributors shut down, but not because they sell porn. It's because they spam relentlessly. I'd be delighted to see clear laws in China and elsewhere forbidding that, and those laws enforced.
If they didn't spam so relentlessly, what people do on their own time with their own bandwidth would be vastly less bothersome to the rest of us. As it is, if I turn spam filters off, I get roughly one-in-five of my email messages as sexual spam. And a bunch of those try their best to auto-pop-up websites that refuse to allow the page to close, leading to some embarassing moments at work and forcing me to shut down my browser entirely and losing work.
Secunia? I haven't tried working with them. Are they more responsive than CERT? Do you have any concrete reason to think that the same over-cooperation in concealing known vulnerabilities that the vendor hasn't fixed found at CERT doesn't apply as well to Secuina? It might not be the case there: I'm actually curious.
IIS, based on the actual code and discovered vulnerabilities, may be more secure. But you can't base that conclusion on a mere shortage of published reports, especially with factors such as I described for CERT. And some of them will apply to Secunia, even if they don't engage in the passive concealment of known vulnerabilities to protect their vendor relationship in which CERT engages. Factors such as deliberate under-reporting by victimized sites to avoid revealing vulnerabilities will apply to Secunia, even if they're good.
In fact, to get access to source to write security products such as Secunia sells, they may be under an NDA that would prohibit them ever revealing such security flaws!