Satan isn't the invisible friend of anyone else. You have to be a christian for the term to have any meaning. To me as an atheist, Satan is as real as Jahwe, Allah, the FSM (sorry Pastafarians, please don't drown me in red sauce). For someone of a different religion, say a Hindu, Satan doesn't have any more meaning than Shiva has for a christian. Satan, god, same thing if you're a Hindu.
So actually, it is more like "my invisible friend is good, but I also have an invisible enemy and he's really bad and everyone I don't like has to be his minion, I'm sure".
Having actually read Paradise Lost, I think there's quite a bit more to that. I think Milton picked up on the trend the church had been going on for quite a while already (also see: "Lucifer in the Middle Ages" by Russel, another greatly recommended book on the subject).
The church had this religion of absolute authority, which literally spells out that your lot is your lot dealt by god and you should accept it. The middle ages were a time we can barely imagine today because the society was extremely rigid - you had your place and that was it. Peasant or king, you didn't have a choice. The question we ask every kid today: "what do you want to do when you grow up?" is a question that never crossed the common medieval mind. The rare exceptions were exactly that: Both rare and exceptions.
The churches doctrine fit perfectly into that and had no small part in creating this society in the first place.
But - in every human being there is also a desire for freedom, to be responsible for your own deeds, to cross the borders, to experiment, to fight for something better than what you've been dealt. This desire can be suppressed, but not erradicated - look at the arabic world right now, these people have been oppressed for forever and yet it takes mere weeks for the common man to come out onto the street and say "I want freedom".
Satan is the church's reaction to that. Look at the image that was created during the middle ages, and only especially well executed by Milton. This figure is the sum total of the freedom-loving human who will disregard the rules of his society, and act according to his own believes, his own set of morals, by what he believes is right and wrong, not by what he is being told. He questions authority and demands his own place in the world, willing to fight even the omnipotent for it. He is the incarnate horror for every autocratic ruler. By creating an extreme version of this figure and putting it up as evil incarnate, the church had created two weapons at once: A stick for those who had their small doubts about the society they lived in, to beat them more or less softly back into the herd, and a sword to behead those who crossed the line and dared to demand to determine their own fate. And that, I think, is why Milton was a little afraid of his own creation: By explaining the character he came dangerously close to uncovering the construction that went into it. To demonstrating that Satan, even more than god, is a projection of the fears of the christian church. That he is the anti-christ, in being the opposite of the obedient, unquestioning subject the church desired.
These people are ruining children's lives and we should be supporting them not laughing at their abusers from a high horse.
Childrens? You are right, but you only see the tip of the iceberg. These people literally have the job to ruin everyone. They call it "salvation", but their own book betrays them. Christianity is a death cult and they want the end of the world, because the cornerstone of their entire belief system is that this world is evil and their "afterlife" is what it is really about.
It takes a while to wrap your head around that, but christians do not share this world with us in any meaningful sense. For them, it's a passing fad and the real game is afterwards. This is just the qualifications round. In this sense, christianity - for the true believer - is a personality disorder.
Frankly, we are all very lucky there are so few real christians, and most of them pay lip service and pick a few concepts that don't violate common sense too badly and call that a belief.
the first one explains a bit more in details what's going on, the second one is very useful if you know the basics and need the specific formula. Like "yeah, I know polar-to-cartesian coordinate transformation goes via atan in the one and cos/sin in the other direction, but what's the actual formula again?".
We are not talking about these kinds of businesses though. You fail at your strawman.
So the hungry kids in Africa are all computer experts just waiting for someone to come along and give them a few bucks so they can write the next botnet? Yeah, right.
These botnets aren't run by kids, they are run by organized crime. Last I checked, the mafia didn't relocate to India because it's cheaper there. You have your people, your networks of influence and power, your ties to the local community and law enforcement, your thugs - all stuff that's not so easy to transport and not so easy to set up someplace else.
someone who is an expert on social engineering
Your claim, not mine. I can connect you to experts in that field if you have business for them, I merely know about it what you pick up when you work in information security for a decade.
I've seen very few pro-wikipedia comments here but have read many decent wikipedia articles, so I think there may be selection bias going on.
Yes, but on which side?
I need some math-help every now and then because quaternions and matrix transformations and some of the more complex trigonometry isn't what I do every day, but occasionally I need it. So I look it up instead of learning it all again. I've found time and time again that WP is one of the worst sources to look for actual answers. They give you all kind of abstract bullshit you don't need. It looks like a comprehensive article, but it doesn't actually help.
Same with many articles on places and persons that I've looked up. WP really isn't written all that well, probably because the vast majority of people can't write very well. So you end up with this accumulation of facts instead of a good article that focuses on what's important to most readers, with the minor points put into an appendix or footnotes.
What I have found WP to be good for is to get a quick impression of what something that you've never heard before is. So if you want to know that, say, the Bluebird is (randomly selected page) then you get a good first impression on WP. But if you need any actual info that's useful beyond answering a trivia quiz question, you have to look elsewhere.
That's really easy to accomplish. All you (WP) need to do is three things:
a) Kick out the assholes currently running the show. Nobody wants to put up with them, least of all people with breains
b) Reserve deletion for very, very obvious abuse, empty placeholders and otherwise clear and undisputed cases. Academics hate it when their citations go away. And the instability of online sources is quite a big deal. Wikipedia has the potential to solve the issue because you can link to a specific article version, but deletionism destroys all that because it breaks history (the history is deleted together with the page).
c) Put in patrolling. Some national Wikipedias have had it for years. If some academic spends two hours improving some article, and some geek in his mother's basement comes along and destroys the work, you can bet it won't get done again. Real people with real jobs actually have better things to do then keep taps on everything and participate in edit wars and all that nonsense. Putting all that behind the scenes and changing the page only when consensus has been reached that the new version is better is one way to keep both the openness and the quality control.
In fact, I think if you start with a) then the rest will follow, because it is so damn obvious.
I don't have the mind for this discontinuous drivel. As you wrote those guidelines, you can write better than that, I'm sure your editor wouldn't have accepted a jumbled mess of incomplete sentences. So if you want to make a point, make it in a way that makes sense.
They're a LINUX, Tom... & proof of a "portent of things to come" for Linux, on "things security"...
Fine, so your point really is about Linux and the mentioning of Android is - I don't know, but apparently we can ignore it. So where are the Linux botnets? Oh yes, I forgot, nobody uses Linux. Except almost all of the Fortune 500 companies, the vast majority of web-, mail-, DNS and other Internet servers, tons of WLAN routers and other devices... we don't even have to count in the desktop machines, even if your "nobody" argument were anywhere near the truth regarding that, there are still millions upon millions of Linux servers out there, connected to the Internet 24/7. So where are the Linux botnets? Where are your facts?
You've not heard of different angles to a problem, have you? I haven't done a paper about economics of spam so far, so how could I contradict something I haven't said?
Cost calculations are not irrelevant. The third world is not by default cheaper. Some things are, like manual labor. Many things aren't, and some things are even more expensive. Unless you do a detailed cost analysis, it isn't as simple as "let's move to a cheap country". Heck, even companies that did do cost analysis learnt the hard way that it can be more expensive in a "cheap" country.
Tablets the MS way *are* a fad and will be going away into their niche soon.
Tablets the iPad way and - maybe, it remains to be seen - Android way are here with us to stay and will be a major market for the next few years.
That's because MS doesn't get it, hasn't for a long time. They can't step out of their "PC" mindset. To them, a games console is a custom-built PC with a custom windows version. And a smartphone is a tiny PC with a custom windows version. And a tablet is a notebook sans keyboard with a custom windows version.
But a console isn't a PC, it's a console. And a phone is a phone, not a mobile PC. And a tablet isn't a special kind of notebook. If you get that, you stand to win big in these years, like Apple already does. If you don't, you'll be left behind, and in a few years, when you finally hire someone who gets it, you'll spend a few billions catching up to where everyone else already is.
Then again, it's not as if MS hadn't done that before.
You make no sense, it's really hard to understand what the heck you're trying to say, but I'll give it a try:
because your 10 yr. old research? It's ANCIENT... today is TODAY,
You must be really young if you think the world changes that quickly. Technical details do. Basic principles don't.
Same with MacOS X once it was more utilized - it became more of a "prime target" because more folks use it now...
That argument has been debunked hundreds of times, get a new one. If prominence were the deciding factor, then all the Linux/Apache webservers would all be rooted while the more obscure windows/IIS servers would all be save. Funny thing is, we don't see that in the real world.
[Android rambling]
I fail to see the relevance of that. This is a discussion about spam, and so far Android systems aren't known as a major source of spam. So either you have data that nobody else has, or you're just dragging in a point that has no relation to the argument for what reason, exactly?
NOBODY USES THEM by comparison to Windows
Yeah, right. That was 10 years ago, today is today and OS X has a market share of 15% in many places of the world, that is considerably more than nobody. Even if you assume a power law, you'd expect about 4% of the botnets to be OS X botnets. Hm, strangely, they aren't.
& malware makers target the SINGLE largest body of users there is
The real world is not instanced. For years, malware has fought over control of rooted PCs, various malware kicking the competition out, etc. - you'd think at least one of them would branch out to a system with less competition. Just one. Strange, doesn't happen. Why? Economics.
why would Apple put out a security hardening guide on their website,
I have no idea what kind of thought processes you have, but they appear confused at the very least. There are similar hardening guides for all variants of windows right on the Microsoft website as well, so your point is what, exactly?
Sorry to say it this honestly, but if there is any point in your drivel that could've been worth my time then it is well hidden in the ghastly grammar and structure.
Wrong discussion. Nobody here claims that all other OSs are perfectly secure and nothing bad could ever happen on them. "Possible" is not what the problem of Spam is even about. "Massive enough to drown everything else" is what the problem is. For that, it has to be more than possible, it has to be so easy that it is economically feasable to root systems on a large scale.
the papers that are posted there point out that there are far more vectors than just Windows
Yes, I know. However, you ignore the point that in those approaches I was simply assuming the existence of a remote root exploit that would work on the target system. Also, that is not spam botnet research. A spam botnet wants to stay undetected and it wants to stay up and running. That requires a different approach. But of course you know all that.
Again, this is not a black-white claim I'm making. I don't say spam would stop if windows were to vanish tomorrow. This is an argument about economics. If the effort to build a botnet on Linux or OS X systems is higher than for windows systems, the economies for the botnet creators change. Spam works by massive volumes due to the tiny return percentage. It needs to send out millions of mails to be profitable. If you are a spammer, you can calculate how much spam on average a rooted system sends before it gets taken down. You can calculate how much it costs to root a system. If either of those variables change, your profit calculations change. If windows were to be replaced by something that is twice as hard to crack and twice as likely to detect a break-in, then your costs suddenly increased four-fold. Is your operation still profitable?
That's what they hope to find. If someone has another note, and maybe a translation for it - maybe the guy gave and explained it to him years prior - you have a chance, even with codewords.
If it's not a cipher but a code, then without such additional help, it's almost hopeless.
Well, having personally seen spam spewing from an open relay on a linux box, seems like pretty decent evidence.
A single data point does not make a trend.
The Linux and MacOS system that spit out spam now are do not disappear if Windows goes away.
True, but we're talking volume here. Do you really think that 98% of e-mail would be spam if it weren't for the botnets?
Now, do you have any supporting evidence to the contrary? Not guesses, theories, thoughts, I mean evidence.
Pretty much any statistics you want to dig up show a massive difference between exploited windows machines and any other OS. Even if you adjust for market share. Even if the other OS is leading, as in the case of LAMP vs. windows webservers.
OS X currently has a market share of - depending who you ask - somewhere between 5% and 15% in the consumer market. The percentage of malware available for OS X compared to the amount available for windows is nowhere even near that share. It's not even in the stadium. The numbers are something like 2 vs. 150,000.
All the major botnets run on windows exclusively. You would think that at least one of them would've taken another target. The most logical explanation is the botnet makers think rationally - as long as one very easy target is available, breaking into a harder target would be a waste of time. But a harder target also means less penetration, even if the easy target were to go away.
Linux has had its share of exploits. Despite that, no Linux botnet is known. In addition to better security, there is more diversity making it harder for automated exploits to spread. I've actually written a paper on that 10 years or so ago, it's somewhere on my website.
I've done my research. Now show yours your shut up.
It's not an arrogant assumption of computer nerds -- I make security blunders too.
The problem isn't that. The problem is how easy they are catastrophic. If our cars were designed that way, highways would be slaughterhouses. Sure, there are quite a few deaths every day, month, year - but we feel compelled to improve on safety continually, instead of shrugging, say "dumb drivers" and going on without a change.
That is what I call arrogance. Even if it was the fault of the driver, maybe you can make an improvement that reduces the likelihood of others making the same mistake?
That probably couldn't be enforced for home computers, so the only answers would be to cripple functionality (would work for a lot of users, actually)
Actually, I'm all for that. Why not give people locked-down machines for starters, and once they've shown they can handle it, let them have a real one? Most wouldn't even need that last step.
The power users wouldn't be happy, though.
Who ever said that one size needs to fit all? Apple is on the right track here - most people really want an appliance, not a general-purpose computer. 90% of computer users do probably less than 10 different tasks on their machine. Websurfing, E-Mail, word processing, managing their photo and music library, gaming, and after that there probably are a bunch of specialized tasks and that's it.
But still, some of us want a full-blown computer. Nobody said that one excludes the other.
Users aren't stupid, they just aren't geeks. It is our fucking job to make these machines useable by normal people. If we can't do that, then it's all just ego-stroking and mental masturbation.
Unless you have done actual research and experiments and have solid evidence to be sure there aren't other causes (bad architecture, bad security design, bad user interface, misleading OS feedback, not to speak of bugs and exploitable faults), "it's the stupid users" is a cop-out, and a cheap one at that.
You don't need to do any packet inspection. A blackhole server, a tarpit, or just the logs on your own mailserver would be enough to identify customers that have a botnet problem.
No other industry gloats in its own superiority in such a way. Any car maker, toaster maker, supermarket layout designer, literally everyone else doesn't subscribe to the "customer is dumb" mantra, but looks at where his product is at fault by giving confusing feedback, not guiding the customer correctly, not being easy enough to use, etc. etc.
And yes, that includes security questions.
Yes, I am a professional in that area. There are a few cases of "human error", but in 99% of the "user is stupid" cases, a better designed software, interface, workflow or whatever would greatly improve upon the problem.
sometimes I think the world is run by toddlers who've escaped the daycare.
It's worse than that. It's run by people with an adult mind and toddler ethics. I'm not kidding, kids have an early phase in their development where they simply can not fathom the concept that there could be a part of the world that does not revolve around them, and can not be easily classified as threat or source-of-food-and-security - or as one of the famous people with that mindset put it "you're either with us..."
And unfortunately, this will not happen for a very, very long time.
You see, spam is just the ugly part of some deep beliefs of our culture. Tackling spam means asking questions few people really want to have asked seriously. For example: Isn't almost all advertisement unsolicited? I certainly didn't opt-in to any of the billboards I encounter every day on the street. Or: Where do we draw the line to unethical business practices, and can we really draw it - in an official, as in on-the-book, way - without declaring half of our major corporations unethical?
Slashdot Mirror
No, I haven't thanks for the hint.
Simple, but wrong.
Satan isn't the invisible friend of anyone else. You have to be a christian for the term to have any meaning. To me as an atheist, Satan is as real as Jahwe, Allah, the FSM (sorry Pastafarians, please don't drown me in red sauce). For someone of a different religion, say a Hindu, Satan doesn't have any more meaning than Shiva has for a christian. Satan, god, same thing if you're a Hindu.
So actually, it is more like "my invisible friend is good, but I also have an invisible enemy and he's really bad and everyone I don't like has to be his minion, I'm sure".
Having actually read Paradise Lost, I think there's quite a bit more to that. I think Milton picked up on the trend the church had been going on for quite a while already (also see: "Lucifer in the Middle Ages" by Russel, another greatly recommended book on the subject).
The church had this religion of absolute authority, which literally spells out that your lot is your lot dealt by god and you should accept it. The middle ages were a time we can barely imagine today because the society was extremely rigid - you had your place and that was it. Peasant or king, you didn't have a choice. The question we ask every kid today: "what do you want to do when you grow up?" is a question that never crossed the common medieval mind. The rare exceptions were exactly that: Both rare and exceptions.
The churches doctrine fit perfectly into that and had no small part in creating this society in the first place.
But - in every human being there is also a desire for freedom, to be responsible for your own deeds, to cross the borders, to experiment, to fight for something better than what you've been dealt. This desire can be suppressed, but not erradicated - look at the arabic world right now, these people have been oppressed for forever and yet it takes mere weeks for the common man to come out onto the street and say "I want freedom".
Satan is the church's reaction to that. Look at the image that was created during the middle ages, and only especially well executed by Milton. This figure is the sum total of the freedom-loving human who will disregard the rules of his society, and act according to his own believes, his own set of morals, by what he believes is right and wrong, not by what he is being told. He questions authority and demands his own place in the world, willing to fight even the omnipotent for it. He is the incarnate horror for every autocratic ruler.
By creating an extreme version of this figure and putting it up as evil incarnate, the church had created two weapons at once: A stick for those who had their small doubts about the society they lived in, to beat them more or less softly back into the herd, and a sword to behead those who crossed the line and dared to demand to determine their own fate.
And that, I think, is why Milton was a little afraid of his own creation: By explaining the character he came dangerously close to uncovering the construction that went into it. To demonstrating that Satan, even more than god, is a projection of the fears of the christian church. That he is the anti-christ, in being the opposite of the obedient, unquestioning subject the church desired.
These people are ruining children's lives and we should be supporting them not laughing at their abusers from a high horse.
Childrens? You are right, but you only see the tip of the iceberg. These people literally have the job to ruin everyone. They call it "salvation", but their own book betrays them. Christianity is a death cult and they want the end of the world, because the cornerstone of their entire belief system is that this world is evil and their "afterlife" is what it is really about.
It takes a while to wrap your head around that, but christians do not share this world with us in any meaningful sense. For them, it's a passing fad and the real game is afterwards. This is just the qualifications round. In this sense, christianity - for the true believer - is a personality disorder.
Frankly, we are all very lucky there are so few real christians, and most of them pay lip service and pick a few concepts that don't violate common sense too badly and call that a belief.
I found most of my recent answers on
http://www.mathsisfun.com/
and
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/
the first one explains a bit more in details what's going on, the second one is very useful if you know the basics and need the specific formula. Like "yeah, I know polar-to-cartesian coordinate transformation goes via atan in the one and cos/sin in the other direction, but what's the actual formula again?".
I think I'll leave you to your bridge, there's no content in this anymore. Bye.
We are not talking about these kinds of businesses though. You fail at your strawman.
So the hungry kids in Africa are all computer experts just waiting for someone to come along and give them a few bucks so they can write the next botnet? Yeah, right.
These botnets aren't run by kids, they are run by organized crime. Last I checked, the mafia didn't relocate to India because it's cheaper there. You have your people, your networks of influence and power, your ties to the local community and law enforcement, your thugs - all stuff that's not so easy to transport and not so easy to set up someplace else.
someone who is an expert on social engineering
Your claim, not mine. I can connect you to experts in that field if you have business for them, I merely know about it what you pick up when you work in information security for a decade.
Bill Gates is a greedy scumbag, news at 11. *yawn*
I've seen very few pro-wikipedia comments here but have read many decent wikipedia articles, so I think there may be selection bias going on.
Yes, but on which side?
I need some math-help every now and then because quaternions and matrix transformations and some of the more complex trigonometry isn't what I do every day, but occasionally I need it. So I look it up instead of learning it all again. I've found time and time again that WP is one of the worst sources to look for actual answers. They give you all kind of abstract bullshit you don't need. It looks like a comprehensive article, but it doesn't actually help.
Same with many articles on places and persons that I've looked up. WP really isn't written all that well, probably because the vast majority of people can't write very well. So you end up with this accumulation of facts instead of a good article that focuses on what's important to most readers, with the minor points put into an appendix or footnotes.
What I have found WP to be good for is to get a quick impression of what something that you've never heard before is. So if you want to know that, say, the Bluebird is (randomly selected page) then you get a good first impression on WP. But if you need any actual info that's useful beyond answering a trivia quiz question, you have to look elsewhere.
That's really easy to accomplish. All you (WP) need to do is three things:
a) Kick out the assholes currently running the show. Nobody wants to put up with them, least of all people with breains
b) Reserve deletion for very, very obvious abuse, empty placeholders and otherwise clear and undisputed cases. Academics hate it when their citations go away. And the instability of online sources is quite a big deal. Wikipedia has the potential to solve the issue because you can link to a specific article version, but deletionism destroys all that because it breaks history (the history is deleted together with the page).
c) Put in patrolling. Some national Wikipedias have had it for years. If some academic spends two hours improving some article, and some geek in his mother's basement comes along and destroys the work, you can bet it won't get done again. Real people with real jobs actually have better things to do then keep taps on everything and participate in edit wars and all that nonsense. Putting all that behind the scenes and changing the page only when consensus has been reached that the new version is better is one way to keep both the openness and the quality control.
In fact, I think if you start with a) then the rest will follow, because it is so damn obvious.
I don't have the mind for this discontinuous drivel. As you wrote those guidelines, you can write better than that, I'm sure your editor wouldn't have accepted a jumbled mess of incomplete sentences. So if you want to make a point, make it in a way that makes sense.
They're a LINUX, Tom... & proof of a "portent of things to come" for Linux, on "things security"...
Fine, so your point really is about Linux and the mentioning of Android is - I don't know, but apparently we can ignore it. So where are the Linux botnets? Oh yes, I forgot, nobody uses Linux. Except almost all of the Fortune 500 companies, the vast majority of web-, mail-, DNS and other Internet servers, tons of WLAN routers and other devices... we don't even have to count in the desktop machines, even if your "nobody" argument were anywhere near the truth regarding that, there are still millions upon millions of Linux servers out there, connected to the Internet 24/7. So where are the Linux botnets? Where are your facts?
You've not heard of different angles to a problem, have you? I haven't done a paper about economics of spam so far, so how could I contradict something I haven't said?
Cost calculations are not irrelevant. The third world is not by default cheaper. Some things are, like manual labor. Many things aren't, and some things are even more expensive. Unless you do a detailed cost analysis, it isn't as simple as "let's move to a cheap country". Heck, even companies that did do cost analysis learnt the hard way that it can be more expensive in a "cheap" country.
Tablets the MS way *are* a fad and will be going away into their niche soon.
Tablets the iPad way and - maybe, it remains to be seen - Android way are here with us to stay and will be a major market for the next few years.
That's because MS doesn't get it, hasn't for a long time. They can't step out of their "PC" mindset. To them, a games console is a custom-built PC with a custom windows version. And a smartphone is a tiny PC with a custom windows version. And a tablet is a notebook sans keyboard with a custom windows version.
But a console isn't a PC, it's a console. And a phone is a phone, not a mobile PC. And a tablet isn't a special kind of notebook. If you get that, you stand to win big in these years, like Apple already does. If you don't, you'll be left behind, and in a few years, when you finally hire someone who gets it, you'll spend a few billions catching up to where everyone else already is.
Then again, it's not as if MS hadn't done that before.
You make no sense, it's really hard to understand what the heck you're trying to say, but I'll give it a try:
because your 10 yr. old research? It's ANCIENT... today is TODAY,
You must be really young if you think the world changes that quickly. Technical details do. Basic principles don't.
Same with MacOS X once it was more utilized - it became more of a "prime target" because more folks use it now...
That argument has been debunked hundreds of times, get a new one. If prominence were the deciding factor, then all the Linux/Apache webservers would all be rooted while the more obscure windows/IIS servers would all be save. Funny thing is, we don't see that in the real world.
[Android rambling]
I fail to see the relevance of that. This is a discussion about spam, and so far Android systems aren't known as a major source of spam. So either you have data that nobody else has, or you're just dragging in a point that has no relation to the argument for what reason, exactly?
NOBODY USES THEM by comparison to Windows
Yeah, right. That was 10 years ago, today is today and OS X has a market share of 15% in many places of the world, that is considerably more than nobody. Even if you assume a power law, you'd expect about 4% of the botnets to be OS X botnets. Hm, strangely, they aren't.
& malware makers target the SINGLE largest body of users there is
The real world is not instanced. For years, malware has fought over control of rooted PCs, various malware kicking the competition out, etc. - you'd think at least one of them would branch out to a system with less competition. Just one. Strange, doesn't happen. Why? Economics.
why would Apple put out a security hardening guide on their website,
I have no idea what kind of thought processes you have, but they appear confused at the very least. There are similar hardening guides for all variants of windows right on the Microsoft website as well, so your point is what, exactly?
Sorry to say it this honestly, but if there is any point in your drivel that could've been worth my time then it is well hidden in the ghastly grammar and structure.
It does show it is possible though,
Wrong discussion. Nobody here claims that all other OSs are perfectly secure and nothing bad could ever happen on them. "Possible" is not what the problem of Spam is even about. "Massive enough to drown everything else" is what the problem is. For that, it has to be more than possible, it has to be so easy that it is economically feasable to root systems on a large scale.
the papers that are posted there point out that there are far more vectors than just Windows
Yes, I know. However, you ignore the point that in those approaches I was simply assuming the existence of a remote root exploit that would work on the target system. Also, that is not spam botnet research. A spam botnet wants to stay undetected and it wants to stay up and running. That requires a different approach. But of course you know all that.
Again, this is not a black-white claim I'm making. I don't say spam would stop if windows were to vanish tomorrow. This is an argument about economics. If the effort to build a botnet on Linux or OS X systems is higher than for windows systems, the economies for the botnet creators change. Spam works by massive volumes due to the tiny return percentage. It needs to send out millions of mails to be profitable. If you are a spammer, you can calculate how much spam on average a rooted system sends before it gets taken down. You can calculate how much it costs to root a system. If either of those variables change, your profit calculations change. If windows were to be replaced by something that is twice as hard to crack and twice as likely to detect a break-in, then your costs suddenly increased four-fold. Is your operation still profitable?
That's what they hope to find. If someone has another note, and maybe a translation for it - maybe the guy gave and explained it to him years prior - you have a chance, even with codewords.
If it's not a cipher but a code, then without such additional help, it's almost hopeless.
Well, having personally seen spam spewing from an open relay on a linux box, seems like pretty decent evidence.
A single data point does not make a trend.
The Linux and MacOS system that spit out spam now are do not disappear if Windows goes away.
True, but we're talking volume here. Do you really think that 98% of e-mail would be spam if it weren't for the botnets?
Now, do you have any supporting evidence to the contrary? Not guesses, theories, thoughts, I mean evidence.
Pretty much any statistics you want to dig up show a massive difference between exploited windows machines and any other OS. Even if you adjust for market share. Even if the other OS is leading, as in the case of LAMP vs. windows webservers.
OS X currently has a market share of - depending who you ask - somewhere between 5% and 15% in the consumer market. The percentage of malware available for OS X compared to the amount available for windows is nowhere even near that share. It's not even in the stadium. The numbers are something like 2 vs. 150,000.
All the major botnets run on windows exclusively. You would think that at least one of them would've taken another target. The most logical explanation is the botnet makers think rationally - as long as one very easy target is available, breaking into a harder target would be a waste of time.
But a harder target also means less penetration, even if the easy target were to go away.
Linux has had its share of exploits. Despite that, no Linux botnet is known. In addition to better security, there is more diversity making it harder for automated exploits to spread. I've actually written a paper on that 10 years or so ago, it's somewhere on my website.
I've done my research. Now show yours your shut up.
It's not an arrogant assumption of computer nerds -- I make security blunders too.
The problem isn't that. The problem is how easy they are catastrophic. If our cars were designed that way, highways would be slaughterhouses. Sure, there are quite a few deaths every day, month, year - but we feel compelled to improve on safety continually, instead of shrugging, say "dumb drivers" and going on without a change.
That is what I call arrogance. Even if it was the fault of the driver, maybe you can make an improvement that reduces the likelihood of others making the same mistake?
That probably couldn't be enforced for home computers, so the only answers would be to cripple functionality (would work for a lot of users, actually)
Actually, I'm all for that. Why not give people locked-down machines for starters, and once they've shown they can handle it, let them have a real one? Most wouldn't even need that last step.
The power users wouldn't be happy, though.
Who ever said that one size needs to fit all? Apple is on the right track here - most people really want an appliance, not a general-purpose computer. 90% of computer users do probably less than 10 different tasks on their machine. Websurfing, E-Mail, word processing, managing their photo and music library, gaming, and after that there probably are a bunch of specialized tasks and that's it.
But still, some of us want a full-blown computer. Nobody said that one excludes the other.
Hubris
Users aren't stupid, they just aren't geeks. It is our fucking job to make these machines useable by normal people. If we can't do that, then it's all just ego-stroking and mental masturbation.
Unless you have done actual research and experiments and have solid evidence to be sure there aren't other causes (bad architecture, bad security design, bad user interface, misleading OS feedback, not to speak of bugs and exploitable faults), "it's the stupid users" is a cop-out, and a cheap one at that.
You don't need to do any packet inspection. A blackhole server, a tarpit, or just the logs on your own mailserver would be enough to identify customers that have a botnet problem.
The weakness is not so much the OS, it's PEBKAC.
That is an arrogant assumption of computer nerds.
No other industry gloats in its own superiority in such a way. Any car maker, toaster maker, supermarket layout designer, literally everyone else doesn't subscribe to the "customer is dumb" mantra, but looks at where his product is at fault by giving confusing feedback, not guiding the customer correctly, not being easy enough to use, etc. etc.
And yes, that includes security questions.
Yes, I am a professional in that area. There are a few cases of "human error", but in 99% of the "user is stupid" cases, a better designed software, interface, workflow or whatever would greatly improve upon the problem.
If Windows disappeared tomorrow, spam would continue and the drop in volume would be temporary.
That is a bold claim. Got any supporting evidence? Not guesses, theories, thoughts, I mean evidence.
sometimes I think the world is run by toddlers who've escaped the daycare.
It's worse than that. It's run by people with an adult mind and toddler ethics. I'm not kidding, kids have an early phase in their development where they simply can not fathom the concept that there could be a part of the world that does not revolve around them, and can not be easily classified as threat or source-of-food-and-security - or as one of the famous people with that mindset put it "you're either with us..."
Yes. As every con-man knows: A sucker is born every minute
And unfortunately, this will not happen for a very, very long time.
You see, spam is just the ugly part of some deep beliefs of our culture. Tackling spam means asking questions few people really want to have asked seriously.
For example: Isn't almost all advertisement unsolicited? I certainly didn't opt-in to any of the billboards I encounter every day on the street.
Or: Where do we draw the line to unethical business practices, and can we really draw it - in an official, as in on-the-book, way - without declaring half of our major corporations unethical?