[geeks] Odd uptick in spam...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

> Google "Storm bot" ...

http://xrl.us/5pmc

Interesting quote:

   ...the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the
   burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been
   compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet
   non-stop for the past three months....

   "In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away,"
   said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in
   an interview. "If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it
   blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very
   frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power,
   but there's not much we can do about it."

   ...and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at
   about 10 percent of capacity.

Pick a market segment, any of them.  Cheese, tires, disposable diapers,
telephone service, document preparation.  If ANY company (other than
Microsoft) in ANY market segment produced and sold a product with such
glaring defects that it could cause even far less economic loss and
inconvenience without its operator's knowledge, someone would be in jail
or coughing up an extremely large pile of cash in damages.

Other monopolies (even small regional ones like telephone companies and
cable television companies) have to take steps to ensure that their
products work as-advertised and are safe and don't cause trouble for
people nearby.  But not Microsoft.

If any other company had such a history for producing mind-boggling bad
crap over and over again, they'd be shut down either by force of market
or force of law, but not Microsoft.

Do Redmondians just give astoundingly good head, or what's the deal
here?

"not much we can do about it"?  How about someone convinces a judge
somewhere to prevent Microsoft from selling their bug-ridden garbage
until they make it fit to see the light of day?

-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )
Elgin, TX            (      "I detest logging filesystems."
USA                   )                    --Linus Torvalds