"I was contending that Macs are vulnerable to security exploits."
This was the reason for Finisterre's original worms. I suggest reading his document about them at www.digitalmunition.com/InqTanaThroughTheEyes.txt, because it blows away some of the "invulnerability" myths held by a large number of Mac fans. Finisterre points out that, despite claims to the contrary by some Mac-based publications, none of his original worms came from any source except himself, although this does not of course say anything about later, more malicious variants. We could endlessly debate the potential sources of these, but it eventually becomes pointless because, like most malware, the real authors are likely to remain unknown.
"like the guys higher up in this thread who think it is impossible to write a virus for a Mac"
They are fools, just like the people who used to insist that Linux was immune to malware were fools. However, some degree of foolishness can be excused in this case because AV vendors have cried wolf too many times over what they knew were actually innocuous proof-of-concept examples that infected nobody outside the research community (who deliberately infected themselves for test purposes). Add to this a notable penchant for producing false positives for these harmless examples that made people delete files until their OS became unusable (Sophos and Symantec have both done this for Finisterre's original Inqtana variants on Macs quite recently), and you have a situation where the Mac community's level of trust in AV companies is now next to non-existent.
"Well then since clamAV was the very first AV company I met, that sort of renders your entire point moot."
I find this claim rather interesting, because ClamAV is neither a company or the product of a company, and AFAIK never has been. It has a trademark which covers both ClamAV and Clam Antivirus (different names for the same thing), but that belongs to Tomasz Kojm, who is the programming project leader, not a CEO, managing director, or anything equivalent, because ClamAV is a non-commercial outfit that doesn't sell anything, but instead uses volountary donations help pay their site operating expenses (hence the fact that it uses a.net domain suffix rather than.com). Some of the project's programmers do offer commercial support in the areas of the world were they live, but this is done independently of the ClamAV project, which gives equal prominence to many other companies that aren't in any way affiliated with the core dev. team. It is thus a pure Stallmanesque FOSS project where the software and its source is given away to anyone who wants it under the GPL, and people (hopefully) make money from it by selling a variety of services, not something like MySQL, JBOSS, or QT, which are controlled by companies who offer fee-based non GPL options for various types of commercial use in addition to their GPL versions.
"At least the elected representatives have at least a basic understanding of lawmaking and its repurcussions."
So by dint of being elected, people magically gain an understanding of lawmaking and its repercussions, hereby ensuring that stupid laws never get proposed, let alone passed. I personally am glad you told me this, otherwise I may have been deluded by lots of apparently stupid laws into thinking that anybody with even a tiny grasp of either lawmaking or repercussions could not have contemplated voting for anything so daft, but now I know that these laws only look stupid to people like me, who aren't elected, and therefore don't have the necessary understanding of lawmaking and repercussions to appreciate the brilliant subtlety of such pieces of legislative genius.
So you are asserting that Finisterre would release a malicious variant of his code _after_ Apple already had produced a patch based on non-malicious examples he'd sent them some time previously? Methinks you are grasping at straws to support your own contention that AV companies don't deliberately release malicious items.
"you left out a number of other suspects including any rougue employee/developer at Apple"
Why would a rogue developer at Apple bother propagating such an ineffectual and lame piece of malware _after_ they know the system has already been patched to render it useless? Who would risk the sack plus both criminal prosecution and being sued for an insane amount by one of the most litigious companies out there to propagate something that their own colleagues have already completely castrated, when they could have done far more mischief at less risk by inserting mischievous code that randomly corrupts stuff into one of Apple's product updates, and then claiming it was a programming error?
"or an [employee of a] anti-virus company/community (clamAV is an open source product)"
1) The code was only supplied to major AV companies, so we can rule out clamAV and those associated with it.
2) An employee of any major AV company would have great difficulty altering and propagating the code for a piece of malware without managerial complicity. Such companies are accustomed to dealing with massive collections of very dangerous software that could do severe damage to their own IT infrastructure if one or more of them accidentally got onto a dev. machine or a piece of writable media (not to mention their reputations if company web-servers started spreading one or more infections to customers), so malware is kept in sealed systems that aren't connected to company networks, and which are located in locked rooms that have very strict access policies. They are aware of the fact that disgruntled or simply mischievous employees or ex-employees would welcome the opportunity to damage them by releasing some of the stuff sitting on their test machines into their many local networks and Internet servers, and therefore do everything in their power to ensure that this is as near to impossible as they can make it.
"There is a world of a difference between a security researcher coming out with a proof of concept exploit (which is what they are paid to do, we want these guys to find the exploits before criminals do), and an anti-virus company making up a fake virus in order to scare gullible customers into buying their product when they were really safe all along."
Read my post again. The original proof of concept code was given to Apple and various anti-virus companies. Some time later, a malicious version was released into the wild without any of the safeguards that the original contained, but with new code that does nasty things. Given the fact that the original was _only_ supplied to Apple and certain AV product vendors, the malicious version of the same worm can only have come from one of three sources:
1) Kevin Finesterre. 2) Apple. 3) One of the AV vendors.
If Finisterre had wanted to release a malicious OS X worm into the wild, then he would not have supplied code demonstrating his attack vectors to Apple so that they could patch them several months before the worm appeared, so we can eliminate him as a source. Apple are equally easy to eliminate because they have nothing to gain by releasing a worm that exploits vulnerabilities in their own products, especially when their patch cost them money to write, but was supplied to end-users at no charge. So we are left with one or more AV product vendors who:
1) had the full source to Finisterre's proofs of concept, and 2) stand to gain financially from anything that tarnishes OS X's patina of invulnerability.
So, as I said before, it is very likely indeed that the malicious variant of Inqtana/B that AV companies were trumpeting about was written and disseminated by one of those AV companies, as nobody else with access to Finisterre's originals before said malicious variant appeared had any motivation for doing it.
"So you are saying OSX/Leap-A, Inqtana, etc., are all inventions of the evil antivirus companies who are trying to convince poor Mac lovers that their OS is vulernable?"
This is pretty much the case for Inqtana. It was written by security researcher Kevin Finesterre as a proof of concept, and only sent to Apple and various Antivirus companies. Apple's response was to plug the vulnerabilities that both variants use in July of 2005 (each exploits a different vulnerability) -- the AV companies on the other hand made lots of noise about it being a "new virus" that proved how necessary their products are.
Some facts about Inqtana:
1) Finisterre did not release either variant into the wild, and I'm pretty sure Apple didn't. It doesn't take much imagination to think of who would profit from releasing the thing, though. 2) Because it was a proof of concept rather than being malicious code, the original (a) did no damage, (b) said what it was, and politely asked the user's permission to install itself irrespective of the attack vector being used. 3) It had in-built limits to prevent it from spreading very far. 4) It told people where it was, and how to remove it.
Despite all the above, the version of Inqtana/B that found its way into the wild lacked Finisterre's safeguards and actually does nasty things, although as seems to be the case with all current OS X "viruses", actually getting infected seems to be something that only a total imbecile can achieve. However, when one considers that (a) he supplied both Apple and the AV companies with full source, (b) it was sent to nobody else, and (c) Apple are the _only_ one of the recipients whose direct interest lies in not propagating such a beast, it doesn't require much in the way of paranoia to suspect at least one of the commercial AV vendors for spreading an altered and malicious variant of the deliberately benign original.
"My point was that he was essentially bragging that he made too much money to even look at something like the Gimp"
What he actually said was that eight hours of his time spent learning GIMP would pay for a Photoshop upgrade, so for him it wasn't a productive option even if it had functional equivalence. A Photoshop upgrade has a street price of around $150, so he's only claiming to earn $20 an hour, which is not a lot of money nowadays -- my programming contract rates are over double that, and I'm not rich.
NB: for companies, GIMP becomes even less economic because they have a whole bunch of cumulative expenses per employee that can end up with the $20/hour graphic designer's work being charged to customers at $100/hour or more without making excessive profits. The $699 RRP for Photoshop (and few pay that much, especially when buying licenses in volume) is therefore a trivial price to pay for a more capable and much faster program which has become such a standard in the graphic design business that its UI is second-nature to most employees and potential employees.
"and that F/OSS is somehow second class in all things because it doesn't work in his specific application of software."
"I spoke to a couple of Brits about British politics and said, in the US it is conservatives that support tax cuts and I thought they said the same went in Britain."
That's because Britain has a political party called the Conservative Party (Tories) whose origins date back to the late 1600s, and the term "conservatives" will therefore generally be assumed by most Brits as being a reference to members thereof. To further the confusion, they also have a Liberal Party which has equally ancient roots (Whigs), although it is now known as the Liberal Democratic Party (which has no connection with US Democrats despite the name).
What a totally stupid and condescending reply to a perfectly reasonable observation about time being a cost in a professional setting. Your pathetic invented anecdote and subsequent observations display the mental acumen of a potto's rectum and the social graces of parrot phlegm, so I really hope for your sake that you are nine years old, and spend the rest of your time arguing with other kids about who has the best dad.
"To this day, the Israelis kill Palestinian refugees throwing rocks at their U.S.-made tanks"
US-made tanks are a fairly small proportion of the current IDF's armour, and all are obsolete models (mostly the M-60). In the past, they've also used British Centurions (many of which have now been converted into armoured personnel carriers), the French AMX-13, and a variety of Soviet tanks captured from Arab countries during wars (note that this is not an exhaustive list, because the Israelis have, by necessity, used anything serviceable that they can get their hands on). The vast bulk of tanks in today's IDF are however Merkavas of various types (mostly Mk-3 and Mk-4), and these are Israeli designs which, with the exception of their engines, are made entirely from Israeli components.
TV detector vans were a mythology created by BBC press officers in the 1950s, and which persists to this day. This mythology was supported by a few vans covered in impressive-looking aerials with gear inside that supposedly picks up emissions from a television's local oscillator that toured the streets of various towns for a few days, but the fact of the matter is that the claimed technology wouldn't be at all feasible in an urban or sub-urban setting due to surrounding TVs, all of which have local oscillators that are outputting various levels of noise (some sets are better shielded that others). It was thus an elabourate deception designed to scare the ignorant into buying licences before the much publicised presence of "detector vans" in their area.
The real TV detection system works as follows: addresses which have licences are kept in a database called "Lassy", so if your residence isn't on their list, they pop round at peak viewing hours, and check for signs of TV usage such a glowing screens showing through curtains, sounds of TV programs coming though doors that have ears pressed against them, etc. (they used to look for aerials, but most non-new premises come with these, and flats may have communal ones, so it's now a futile exercise). Of course, they will then claim that they found you with a detector van or one of their new hand-held detectors to keep the myth going, but the reality of the situation is laid out on paper in the National Audit Office's 2002 report:
"the BBC is introducing new detector vans with enhanced capabilities to detect when a television is in use. This will make it easier for enquiry officers to establish that an offence is likely to be taking place, although they will still need to secure further evidence for successful prosecution. Detection equipment has been used in conjunction with targeted advertising to act as a visible deterrent."
In other words, the courts won't accept detector-based information as evidence, so their only real use is as a deterrent, which means that the likelihood of them being equipped with anything approaching real detection equipment (which is expensive due to its less-than-wide deployment) is extremely remote, even if such a technology could be used effectively in areas with a population density above that of remote farmhouses in the Welsh hills.
NB: although the TV Licensing chap may wear an impressive looking police-like jacket with a kevlar vest underneath, he is a civilian, and one is not therefore obliged to open one's door to him, or talk to him. He has no right to force entry, and one should call the police if he does -- he will then be arrested for breaking an entering,
Note also that any subsequent attempts to conduct formal interviews should be rebuffed, despite the fact that whoever is attempting to do so might read the official police caution. There is no statutory requirement to cooperate in any way with these people _unless_ they have a court search order, in which case they will be accompanied by real police officers rather than merely somebody pretending to be one. Refusal to cooperate will not count against one in a court case because TV Licensing employees have exactly the same powers as the bloke delivering groceries, the newspaper boy, or the Avon lady, i.e. those of any other civilian who is employed by a company to visit people at home. It's a shame more people don't know this, because their jobs would become impossible without the ability to intimidate the public into cooperating with them, and the current "pay or else" model would then have to be replaced with something else.
"we aren't killing the terrorists' countrymen. We're mostly killing Iraqis and the odd Afghani. The terrorists that attacked us were (probably) mostly from saudi arabia."
The Arabs don't necessarily see things that way. Many of the "countries" in the Arabian Peninsula are post-WW1 creations of the British and French, who divided up the old Ottoman Empire between them, and installed "sympathetic" ruling families, some as a reward for assistance rendered during the Great War, others to maintain control of important strategic resources (usually harbours, trade routes, and the like -- oil wasn't as important in those days). However, these more or less arbitrary divisions imposed from outside were not very well received by the population of the region, so rebellions were quite common, with the usual result being intervention by the armed forces of the rulers' European allies, whose sometimes brutal tactics caused a lot of resentment that is still there (Arabs have very long memories, as is evidenced by the fact that The Crusades are still a sore point with many of them).
So the fact of the matter is that many Arabs think of Iraqis, Saudis, Palestinians, Kuwaitis, etc. as being "countrymen" irrespective of where they themselves might live because they feel that the borders Britain and France imposed on them are artificial imperial constructs that they didn't want, and don't recognise.
It's the new Microsoft WorksForSure(TM)(R) system. Instead of bothering people with endless dialogs that require confirmation, WorksForSure has a single one that pops up saying "Windows has decided that you aren't allowed to do that. Click the OK button to continue".
There isn't really a lot of information available about how the Wii's region coding works, so it's difficult to say what geographical areas constitute a "region" for Nintendo, and therefore what the implications will be for those who import them from other parts of the world. We shall therefore probably have to wait until people get their hands on them before any definitive information appears, but I think that the likelihood of this particular "feature" pissing off a lot of existing Nintendo fans all over the world is pretty high, as many of these have become accustomed to buying titles for their current consoles from foreign suppliers when a particular game isn't available at home.
"But the region setting on it will probably be US or Japan which means that you can't buy any games for the Wii in Europe..."
The fact that (a) many games never appear in Europe, and (b) those that do are usually significantly more expensive means that this is a plus rather than a minus.
"Do you think that just maybe it's possible that people who spend more time at a computer have less time to listen to music?"
Or are simply spending money that they might otherwise have used to buy CDs for things such as broadband rental, software, etc. Most peoples' entertainment budgets are quite limited, so money that gets spent on computer-related things isn't available for other types of non-essentials.
It will I think be interesting to see what happens to CD sales when the Wii and Playstation-3 are launched, because having two much-anticipated "next gen" consoles appear at virtually the same time (and near XMas too) is going to mean that a lot of male entertainment budgets will be eaten up for quite a while, especially after some games and extra controllers have been bought.
"Does it involve booty dancing videos or angsty emo kids screaming?"
You've hit the nail on the head without realising it. The "suckage" level of music went up at as videos became a more and more important method of promoting an act. Prior to that, non-photogenic artists could become extremely successful if they sounded good, but this changed (albeit gradually) until, some time in the 1990s, an artist's appearance became more important than their musical talent.
"most major stars aren't even really musicians in their own right, but rather manufactured acts."
Manufactured acts are nothing new in the pop world. The so-called "bubblegum pop" that became popular in the late 1950s and 1960s consisted largely of manufactured acts, and most people know that The Monkees were the first manufactured super-group (and also the first one chosen primarily for its appearance due to a TV series being used as a launch vehicle). Few of these acts could play instruments or sing, hence the fact that they either avoided live appearances, or mimed to recordings. Quite a few people thought that they and their usually forgettable music was crap, but this didn't stop it from being very popular in its time, although most of them are now forgotten.
For a theoretical buyer who has no existing music collection to rip onto said Nano, and therefore no other music playing devices at all, so obviously no interest in music, but suddenly gets the urge for a Nano, and 10,000 songs from iTMS. I suppose Apple's advertising must be responsible for millions of previously music-unaware people suddenly having epiphanies, rushing out to buy Nanos, and then filling them with a collection of tracks that would occupy well over 500 conventional music CDs. Or perhaps they were simply walking past a store, saw some Nanos in the Window, and thought "Hey, I've got a couple of hundred spondooliks burning a hole in my pocket, so I'll blow it on one of those little boxes with a wheel, despite the fact I don't know what it is or does", and then, after getting it home, realising that it plays a strange thing called "music" that they must now rush out and buy in massive quantities for life to be worth living.
"Besides all that, I know we're supposed to hate Microsoft but, hey now, we're talking about the EU! Am I the only one who remembers all the red coats and that "rather unpleasant matter concerning tea" up in Boston?"
Whilst apparently conveniently forgetting that you were helped in the fight against said red coats by the French, who are an EU founder member, and therefore have been part of it for far longer than Britain.
"Any remotely intelligent science fiction writer will tell you that they aren't TRYING to predict the future. Good science fiction is about commenting on the PRESENT. The future presented in science fiction is just a literary device to achieve that end."
If indeed it presents a future at all, because a lot of SF is set at the time the story was written or in the past.
"For instance in the future you invent a time machine and travel into the present. The world splits into two alternative futures and you always end up in the one in which you didn't invent a time machine."
Which is just another way of saying that practical time travel is impossible, or at least where the past is concerned.
"At which point said manufacturer could either fix my computer or face me in small claims court."
Where they'd win, because their job was to fix the hardware, not Microsoft's OS. Unless you can demonstrate that the repair itself was faulty, you have no case against the computer manufacturer, and also none against MS because their EULA indemnifies them against everything.
"They have no excuse whatsoever, as 1) they clearly cannot have tested the machine"
By that logic, they wouldn't be able to test a machine whose OS / BIOS was password protected either, yet they clearly can, because they do it all the time without having to ask for those passwords (a good thing too, as many people who use passwords would be reluctant to give them to a bunch of unknown people in a hardware repair department).
"2) XP activation has been known about for years, and to screw up in this way displays a quite staggering level of incompetence on their part."
How is replacing a piece of hardware that has failed incompetence, when _the same repair with any other OS_ will work without problems? Surely the incompetent party is MS for writing an OS that is unique in its inability to cope with a system being repaired by its manufacturer.
"There are plenty of reasons to bitch about XP's activation, but someone else screwing your machine over because of their own incompetence isn't one of them."
The _machine_ has not been screwed over, it has been repaired. The problem is entirely with Microsoft's OS, which the computer manufacturer also did not "screw", because it is behaving just as MS designed it to, i.e. in a way that benefits them rather than the customer. If the manufacturer had somehow garbaged Windows during the repair, then that would be a different matter, but blaming them for the fact that Windows XP is doing exactly what Microsoft wants it to reveals a level of MS apology that goes far beyond the merely blatant.
"If all that ever happened was wealth movement, then everyone else in the world ought to live in stone age conditions given the lifestyles of industrialized nations. Regardless of the hyperbole used by anti-capitalists and others with anti-west agendas, that is not the case."
Yes, thanks to the wealth generated by the industrialized nations, most people in the world now live in mediaeval conditions rather than stone-age ones, albeit somewhat over-populated and polluted mediaeval conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
"I was contending that Macs are vulnerable to security exploits."
, because it blows away some of the "invulnerability" myths held by a large number of Mac fans. Finisterre points out that, despite claims to the contrary by some Mac-based publications, none of his original worms came from any source except himself, although this does not of course say anything about later, more malicious variants. We could endlessly debate the potential sources of these, but it eventually becomes pointless because, like most malware, the real authors are likely to remain unknown.
.net domain suffix rather than .com). Some of the project's programmers do offer commercial support in the areas of the world were they live, but this is done independently of the ClamAV project, which gives equal prominence to many other companies that aren't in any way affiliated with the core dev. team. It is thus a pure Stallmanesque FOSS project where the software and its source is given away to anyone who wants it under the GPL, and people (hopefully) make money from it by selling a variety of services, not something like MySQL, JBOSS, or QT, which are controlled by companies who offer fee-based non GPL options for various types of commercial use in addition to their GPL versions.
This was the reason for Finisterre's original worms. I suggest reading his document about them at www.digitalmunition.com/InqTanaThroughTheEyes.txt
"like the guys higher up in this thread who think it is impossible to write a virus for a Mac"
They are fools, just like the people who used to insist that Linux was immune to malware were fools. However, some degree of foolishness can be excused in this case because AV vendors have cried wolf too many times over what they knew were actually innocuous proof-of-concept examples that infected nobody outside the research community (who deliberately infected themselves for test purposes). Add to this a notable penchant for producing false positives for these harmless examples that made people delete files until their OS became unusable (Sophos and Symantec have both done this for Finisterre's original Inqtana variants on Macs quite recently), and you have a situation where the Mac community's level of trust in AV companies is now next to non-existent.
"Well then since clamAV was the very first AV company I met, that sort of renders your entire point moot."
I find this claim rather interesting, because ClamAV is neither a company or the product of a company, and AFAIK never has been. It has a trademark which covers both ClamAV and Clam Antivirus (different names for the same thing), but that belongs to Tomasz Kojm, who is the programming project leader, not a CEO, managing director, or anything equivalent, because ClamAV is a non-commercial outfit that doesn't sell anything, but instead uses volountary donations help pay their site operating expenses (hence the fact that it uses a
"At least the elected representatives have at least a basic understanding of lawmaking and its repurcussions."
So by dint of being elected, people magically gain an understanding of lawmaking and its repercussions, hereby ensuring that stupid laws never get proposed, let alone passed. I personally am glad you told me this, otherwise I may have been deluded by lots of apparently stupid laws into thinking that anybody with even a tiny grasp of either lawmaking or repercussions could not have contemplated voting for anything so daft, but now I know that these laws only look stupid to people like me, who aren't elected, and therefore don't have the necessary understanding of lawmaking and repercussions to appreciate the brilliant subtlety of such pieces of legislative genius.
"I don't buy your logic ruling out Finisterre"
So you are asserting that Finisterre would release a malicious variant of his code _after_ Apple already had produced a patch based on non-malicious examples he'd sent them some time previously? Methinks you are grasping at straws to support your own contention that AV companies don't deliberately release malicious items.
"you left out a number of other suspects including any rougue employee/developer at Apple"
Why would a rogue developer at Apple bother propagating such an ineffectual and lame piece of malware _after_ they know the system has already been patched to render it useless? Who would risk the sack plus both criminal prosecution and being sued for an insane amount by one of the most litigious companies out there to propagate something that their own colleagues have already completely castrated, when they could have done far more mischief at less risk by inserting mischievous code that randomly corrupts stuff into one of Apple's product updates, and then claiming it was a programming error?
"or an [employee of a] anti-virus company/community (clamAV is an open source product)"
1) The code was only supplied to major AV companies, so we can rule out clamAV and those associated with it.
2) An employee of any major AV company would have great difficulty altering and propagating the code for a piece of malware without managerial complicity. Such companies are accustomed to dealing with massive collections of very dangerous software that could do severe damage to their own IT infrastructure if one or more of them accidentally got onto a dev. machine or a piece of writable media (not to mention their reputations if company web-servers started spreading one or more infections to customers), so malware is kept in sealed systems that aren't connected to company networks, and which are located in locked rooms that have very strict access policies. They are aware of the fact that disgruntled or simply mischievous employees or ex-employees would welcome the opportunity to damage them by releasing some of the stuff sitting on their test machines into their many local networks and Internet servers, and therefore do everything in their power to ensure that this is as near to impossible as they can make it.
"There is a world of a difference between a security researcher coming out with a proof of concept exploit (which is what they are paid to do, we want these guys to find the exploits before criminals do), and an anti-virus company making up a fake virus in order to scare gullible customers into buying their product when they were really safe all along."
Read my post again. The original proof of concept code was given to Apple and various anti-virus companies. Some time later, a malicious version was released into the wild without any of the safeguards that the original contained, but with new code that does nasty things. Given the fact that the original was _only_ supplied to Apple and certain AV product vendors, the malicious version of the same worm can only have come from one of three sources:
1) Kevin Finesterre.
2) Apple.
3) One of the AV vendors.
If Finisterre had wanted to release a malicious OS X worm into the wild, then he would not have supplied code demonstrating his attack vectors to Apple so that they could patch them several months before the worm appeared, so we can eliminate him as a source. Apple are equally easy to eliminate because they have nothing to gain by releasing a worm that exploits vulnerabilities in their own products, especially when their patch cost them money to write, but was supplied to end-users at no charge. So we are left with one or more AV product vendors who:
1) had the full source to Finisterre's proofs of concept, and
2) stand to gain financially from anything that tarnishes OS X's patina of invulnerability.
So, as I said before, it is very likely indeed that the malicious variant of Inqtana/B that AV companies were trumpeting about was written and disseminated by one of those AV companies, as nobody else with access to Finisterre's originals before said malicious variant appeared had any motivation for doing it.
"So you are saying OSX/Leap-A, Inqtana, etc., are all inventions of the evil antivirus companies who are trying to convince poor Mac lovers that their OS is vulernable?"
This is pretty much the case for Inqtana. It was written by security researcher Kevin Finesterre as a proof of concept, and only sent to Apple and various Antivirus companies. Apple's response was to plug the vulnerabilities that both variants use in July of 2005 (each exploits a different vulnerability) -- the AV companies on the other hand made lots of noise about it being a "new virus" that proved how necessary their products are.
Some facts about Inqtana:
1) Finisterre did not release either variant into the wild, and I'm pretty sure Apple didn't. It doesn't take much imagination to think of who would profit from releasing the thing, though.
2) Because it was a proof of concept rather than being malicious code, the original (a) did no damage, (b) said what it was, and politely asked the user's permission to install itself irrespective of the attack vector being used.
3) It had in-built limits to prevent it from spreading very far.
4) It told people where it was, and how to remove it.
Despite all the above, the version of Inqtana/B that found its way into the wild lacked Finisterre's safeguards and actually does nasty things, although as seems to be the case with all current OS X "viruses", actually getting infected seems to be something that only a total imbecile can achieve. However, when one considers that (a) he supplied both Apple and the AV companies with full source, (b) it was sent to nobody else, and (c) Apple are the _only_ one of the recipients whose direct interest lies in not propagating such a beast, it doesn't require much in the way of paranoia to suspect at least one of the commercial AV vendors for spreading an altered and malicious variant of the deliberately benign original.
"My point was that he was essentially bragging that he made too much money to even look at something like the Gimp"
What he actually said was that eight hours of his time spent learning GIMP would pay for a Photoshop upgrade, so for him it wasn't a productive option even if it had functional equivalence. A Photoshop upgrade has a street price of around $150, so he's only claiming to earn $20 an hour, which is not a lot of money nowadays -- my programming contract rates are over double that, and I'm not rich.
NB: for companies, GIMP becomes even less economic because they have a whole bunch of cumulative expenses per employee that can end up with the $20/hour graphic designer's work being charged to customers at $100/hour or more without making excessive profits. The $699 RRP for Photoshop (and few pay that much, especially when buying licenses in volume) is therefore a trivial price to pay for a more capable and much faster program which has become such a standard in the graphic design business that its UI is second-nature to most employees and potential employees.
"and that F/OSS is somehow second class in all things because it doesn't work in his specific application of software."
He said nothing whatsoever about FOSS in general.
"I spoke to a couple of Brits about British politics and said, in the US it is conservatives that support tax cuts and I thought they said the same went in Britain."
That's because Britain has a political party called the Conservative Party (Tories) whose origins date back to the late 1600s, and the term "conservatives" will therefore generally be assumed by most Brits as being a reference to members thereof. To further the confusion, they also have a Liberal Party which has equally ancient roots (Whigs), although it is now known as the Liberal Democratic Party (which has no connection with US Democrats despite the name).
What a totally stupid and condescending reply to a perfectly reasonable observation about time being a cost in a professional setting. Your pathetic invented anecdote and subsequent observations display the mental acumen of a potto's rectum and the social graces of parrot phlegm, so I really hope for your sake that you are nine years old, and spend the rest of your time arguing with other kids about who has the best dad.
Your timeline and some of your conclusions are off, because Windows/NT was launched in 1993, two years before Windows-95.
"To this day, the Israelis kill Palestinian refugees throwing rocks at their U.S.-made tanks"
US-made tanks are a fairly small proportion of the current IDF's armour, and all are obsolete models (mostly the M-60). In the past, they've also used British Centurions (many of which have now been converted into armoured personnel carriers), the French AMX-13, and a variety of Soviet tanks captured from Arab countries during wars (note that this is not an exhaustive list, because the Israelis have, by necessity, used anything serviceable that they can get their hands on). The vast bulk of tanks in today's IDF are however Merkavas of various types (mostly Mk-3 and Mk-4), and these are Israeli designs which, with the exception of their engines, are made entirely from Israeli components.
In which a favourite human character will be phased out and replaced by a similarly named CGI comic relief called Jarbuck.
TV detector vans were a mythology created by BBC press officers in the 1950s, and which persists to this day. This mythology was supported by a few vans covered in impressive-looking aerials with gear inside that supposedly picks up emissions from a television's local oscillator that toured the streets of various towns for a few days, but the fact of the matter is that the claimed technology wouldn't be at all feasible in an urban or sub-urban setting due to surrounding TVs, all of which have local oscillators that are outputting various levels of noise (some sets are better shielded that others). It was thus an elabourate deception designed to scare the ignorant into buying licences before the much publicised presence of "detector vans" in their area.
The real TV detection system works as follows: addresses which have licences are kept in a database called "Lassy", so if your residence isn't on their list, they pop round at peak viewing hours, and check for signs of TV usage such a glowing screens showing through curtains, sounds of TV programs coming though doors that have ears pressed against them, etc. (they used to look for aerials, but most non-new premises come with these, and flats may have communal ones, so it's now a futile exercise). Of course, they will then claim that they found you with a detector van or one of their new hand-held detectors to keep the myth going, but the reality of the situation is laid out on paper in the National Audit Office's 2002 report:
"the BBC is introducing new detector vans with enhanced capabilities to detect when a television is in use. This will make it easier for enquiry officers to establish that an offence is likely to be taking place, although they will still need to secure further evidence for successful prosecution. Detection equipment has been used in conjunction with targeted advertising to act as a visible deterrent."
In other words, the courts won't accept detector-based information as evidence, so their only real use is as a deterrent, which means that the likelihood of them being equipped with anything approaching real detection equipment (which is expensive due to its less-than-wide deployment) is extremely remote, even if such a technology could be used effectively in areas with a population density above that of remote farmhouses in the Welsh hills.
NB: although the TV Licensing chap may wear an impressive looking police-like jacket with a kevlar vest underneath, he is a civilian, and one is not therefore obliged to open one's door to him, or talk to him. He has no right to force entry, and one should call the police if he does -- he will then be arrested for breaking an entering,
Note also that any subsequent attempts to conduct formal interviews should be rebuffed, despite the fact that whoever is attempting to do so might read the official police caution. There is no statutory requirement to cooperate in any way with these people _unless_ they have a court search order, in which case they will be accompanied by real police officers rather than merely somebody pretending to be one. Refusal to cooperate will not count against one in a court case because TV Licensing employees have exactly the same powers as the bloke delivering groceries, the newspaper boy, or the Avon lady, i.e. those of any other civilian who is employed by a company to visit people at home. It's a shame more people don't know this, because their jobs would become impossible without the ability to intimidate the public into cooperating with them, and the current "pay or else" model would then have to be replaced with something else.
"we aren't killing the terrorists' countrymen. We're mostly killing Iraqis and the odd Afghani. The terrorists that attacked us were (probably) mostly from saudi arabia."
The Arabs don't necessarily see things that way. Many of the "countries" in the Arabian Peninsula are post-WW1 creations of the British and French, who divided up the old Ottoman Empire between them, and installed "sympathetic" ruling families, some as a reward for assistance rendered during the Great War, others to maintain control of important strategic resources (usually harbours, trade routes, and the like -- oil wasn't as important in those days). However, these more or less arbitrary divisions imposed from outside were not very well received by the population of the region, so rebellions were quite common, with the usual result being intervention by the armed forces of the rulers' European allies, whose sometimes brutal tactics caused a lot of resentment that is still there (Arabs have very long memories, as is evidenced by the fact that The Crusades are still a sore point with many of them).
So the fact of the matter is that many Arabs think of Iraqis, Saudis, Palestinians, Kuwaitis, etc. as being "countrymen" irrespective of where they themselves might live because they feel that the borders Britain and France imposed on them are artificial imperial constructs that they didn't want, and don't recognise.
It's the new Microsoft WorksForSure(TM)(R) system. Instead of bothering people with endless dialogs that require confirmation, WorksForSure has a single one that pops up saying "Windows has decided that you aren't allowed to do that. Click the OK button to continue".
There isn't really a lot of information available about how the Wii's region coding works, so it's difficult to say what geographical areas constitute a "region" for Nintendo, and therefore what the implications will be for those who import them from other parts of the world. We shall therefore probably have to wait until people get their hands on them before any definitive information appears, but I think that the likelihood of this particular "feature" pissing off a lot of existing Nintendo fans all over the world is pretty high, as many of these have become accustomed to buying titles for their current consoles from foreign suppliers when a particular game isn't available at home.
"But the region setting on it will probably be US or Japan which means that you can't buy any games for the Wii in Europe..."
The fact that (a) many games never appear in Europe, and (b) those that do are usually significantly more expensive means that this is a plus rather than a minus.
"Do you think that just maybe it's possible that people who spend more time at a computer have less time to listen to music?"
Or are simply spending money that they might otherwise have used to buy CDs for things such as broadband rental, software, etc. Most peoples' entertainment budgets are quite limited, so money that gets spent on computer-related things isn't available for other types of non-essentials.
It will I think be interesting to see what happens to CD sales when the Wii and Playstation-3 are launched, because having two much-anticipated "next gen" consoles appear at virtually the same time (and near XMas too) is going to mean that a lot of male entertainment budgets will be eaten up for quite a while, especially after some games and extra controllers have been bought.
"Does it involve booty dancing videos or angsty emo kids screaming?"
You've hit the nail on the head without realising it. The "suckage" level of music went up at as videos became a more and more important method of promoting an act. Prior to that, non-photogenic artists could become extremely successful if they sounded good, but this changed (albeit gradually) until, some time in the 1990s, an artist's appearance became more important than their musical talent.
"most major stars aren't even really musicians in their own right, but rather manufactured acts."
Manufactured acts are nothing new in the pop world. The so-called "bubblegum pop" that became popular in the late 1950s and 1960s consisted largely of manufactured acts, and most people know that The Monkees were the first manufactured super-group (and also the first one chosen primarily for its appearance due to a TV series being used as a launch vehicle). Few of these acts could play instruments or sing, hence the fact that they either avoided live appearances, or mimed to recordings. Quite a few people thought that they and their usually forgettable music was crap, but this didn't stop it from being very popular in its time, although most of them are now forgotten.
"Like I said, $10,000 to fill a nano"
For a theoretical buyer who has no existing music collection to rip onto said Nano, and therefore no other music playing devices at all, so obviously no interest in music, but suddenly gets the urge for a Nano, and 10,000 songs from iTMS. I suppose Apple's advertising must be responsible for millions of previously music-unaware people suddenly having epiphanies, rushing out to buy Nanos, and then filling them with a collection of tracks that would occupy well over 500 conventional music CDs. Or perhaps they were simply walking past a store, saw some Nanos in the Window, and thought "Hey, I've got a couple of hundred spondooliks burning a hole in my pocket, so I'll blow it on one of those little boxes with a wheel, despite the fact I don't know what it is or does", and then, after getting it home, realising that it plays a strange thing called "music" that they must now rush out and buy in massive quantities for life to be worth living.
"Besides all that, I know we're supposed to hate Microsoft but, hey now, we're talking about the EU! Am I the only one who remembers all the red coats and that "rather unpleasant matter concerning tea" up in Boston?"
Whilst apparently conveniently forgetting that you were helped in the fight against said red coats by the French, who are an EU founder member, and therefore have been part of it for far longer than Britain.
"Any remotely intelligent science fiction writer will tell you that they aren't TRYING to predict the future. Good science fiction is about commenting on the PRESENT. The future presented in science fiction is just a literary device to achieve that end."
If indeed it presents a future at all, because a lot of SF is set at the time the story was written or in the past.
"For instance in the future you invent a time machine and travel into the present. The world splits into two alternative futures and you always end up in the one in which you didn't invent a time machine."
Which is just another way of saying that practical time travel is impossible, or at least where the past is concerned.
is also a prevalent theme in science fiction, but that doesn't mean we'll be doing it in the foreseeable future.
"At which point said manufacturer could either fix my computer or face me in small claims court."
Where they'd win, because their job was to fix the hardware, not Microsoft's OS. Unless you can demonstrate that the repair itself was faulty, you have no case against the computer manufacturer, and also none against MS because their EULA indemnifies them against everything.
"They have no excuse whatsoever, as 1) they clearly cannot have tested the machine"
By that logic, they wouldn't be able to test a machine whose OS / BIOS was password protected either, yet they clearly can, because they do it all the time without having to ask for those passwords (a good thing too, as many people who use passwords would be reluctant to give them to a bunch of unknown people in a hardware repair department).
"2) XP activation has been known about for years, and to screw up in this way displays a quite staggering level of incompetence on their part."
How is replacing a piece of hardware that has failed incompetence, when _the same repair with any other OS_ will work without problems? Surely the incompetent party is MS for writing an OS that is unique in its inability to cope with a system being repaired by its manufacturer.
"There are plenty of reasons to bitch about XP's activation, but someone else screwing your machine over because of their own incompetence isn't one of them."
The _machine_ has not been screwed over, it has been repaired. The problem is entirely with Microsoft's OS, which the computer manufacturer also did not "screw", because it is behaving just as MS designed it to, i.e. in a way that benefits them rather than the customer. If the manufacturer had somehow garbaged Windows during the repair, then that would be a different matter, but blaming them for the fact that Windows XP is doing exactly what Microsoft wants it to reveals a level of MS apology that goes far beyond the merely blatant.
"If all that ever happened was wealth movement, then everyone else in the world ought to live in stone age conditions given the lifestyles of industrialized nations. Regardless of the hyperbole used by anti-capitalists and others with anti-west agendas, that is not the case."
Yes, thanks to the wealth generated by the industrialized nations, most people in the world now live in mediaeval conditions rather than stone-age ones, albeit somewhat over-populated and polluted mediaeval conditions.