[geeks] can't wait for Vista

[Phil Stracchino]

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 01:34:57PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>> I can't say this politely, so pardon the indignation, but this is pure
>>> bullshirt.
>> In your opinion.
> 
> This has degenerated into a pissing contest. Tell me in simple plain English
> how Microsoft's business practices or policies interfere with communication
> between people who don't use their products.

OK.

I had to STOP ACCEPTING MAIL at my babcom.com domain because my
connection was being DoS'd by the sheer volume of spam.  Much of this
spam comes from botnets of Microsoft Windows installations, many of
which were compromised and trojanned within minutes of first being
connected to the 'net because Windows is insecure by default, and cannot
be effectively secured by the casual end-user because it is so deeply
and systematically insecure.  Windows is insecure by default because
Microsoft, as a matter of corporate policy and business practice, does
not really care about security.  Security is the end-user's problem.

Microsoft has always had a policy of prioritizing adding new, shiny,
whizbang features over implementing basic security, no matter what the
security consequences of the new bling.  Microsoft invented the
inherently-insecure ActiveX because they failed in their efforts to
steal Java, and we're still paying for that.  There's a new zero-day
active exploit against ActiveX in the wild right now as we speak, and
Microsoft doesn't have a patch for it yet.  It often takes Microsoft
months to patch holes.  Some known holes, they NEVER patch.


Then there's people who have to pay the "Windows Tax" on PC hardware
they buy with no pre-installed OS, that will never run Windows, because
Microsoft has the computer manufacturers intimidated into paying
Microsoft a Windows license fee for every computer they manufacture,
whether they shipped Windows (and DOS before it) on the machine or not.

And I do trust you're not going to try to claim no-one has ever been
harmed by Microsoft's business practices on all the times when Microsoft
has stolen another company's product by signing an NDA, entering into a
development agreement of some kind, then cancelling the deal and
building their own product based on the stolen technology.  Quite a few
of those cases have gone to court.  In some of them, the plaintiffs even
managed to win, despite Microsoft's seemingly-bottomless legal pockets.


> Let's be fair about it. In order to apply,the people who are interfered with
> have to be using NO Microsoft products. It's not limited to Microsoft
> Windows.

So they can't own a cell phone running embedded Windows?

> They have to be not using I.E. (which is pretty much Windows only
> these days) or  Entourage or Outlook or  IIS. Programs that incendentialy
> have parts of them copyright by Microsoft, such as Solaris are ok.
> 
> You also have to limit yourself to legal copies of the programs. Viruses
> and worms don't count unless Microsoft does not offer a patch to fix 
> the exploit they use.

That's an unfair and unreasonable restriction.  If I sell a car so
poorly made that it is involved more often in crashes and mechanical
breakdowns than all other vehicles on the road put together, I cannot
claim the crashes aren't my fault because each car was working perfectly
when it was driven off the dealer lot.

Microsoft sells an operating system so poorly made that it is involved
in more trojans and virus/worm infections than all other computers on
the Internet put together.  You can't claim that Microsoft isn't
responsible on grounds that the machine wasn't infected at completion of
installation.

Hell, Microsoft heavily touted Windows NT as a secure server OS for
commercial applications based on the claim of its having achieved a
government C2 security certification.  They didn't bother to tell anyone
that NT loses its C2 security rating the moment you connect it to any
kind of network.  Selling it as a C2-secure server OS was a flat-out,
bald-faced lie.


Any other get-out-of-jail-free escape clauses you want to offer Microsoft?


Yeah, OK, BPL is bad.  We've gotten that message.  We accept that it has
severe technical problems and that it causes wide-band radio
interference.  That's not news to anyone.  But when you start trying to
assert that no Microsoft product, practice or policy has ever harmed
anyone nearly as badly as Google has harmed the world by funding BPL
development, and that Google is therefore worse than Microsoft, the
argument just sounds shrill and hysterical and you start discrediting
yourself.


-- 
 Same geek, same site, new location
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-429-0220
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater