Re: A serious threat to our national security




AnimalMagic wrote:

Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote:

James Arthur wrote:

That's Bill Gate's major innovation--his solution to the
question "How can you make loads of money off a product
that never breaks, and never wears out?"

His answer is a combination of making sure the thing
you buy is defective, and or deficient, or of making
it obsolete, and parcelling out improvements (and
even fixes) as slowly as possible.

Hence changing Word and Excel's formats, changing the
OS to break old applications, shipping bugs, security
issues, etc.

It just hit me yesterday--I've oft noted the harm he's
done selling lousy software, but I just realized...he
breaks our tools. My superb DOS file compare, search
routine, editor, directory utility, parallel port-
operated interfaces, truly nifty ISA A/D board... broken.

The advance of civilization has been one of building
tool upon tool, hand tools ==> machines ==> machine
tools ==> better machines ==> better tools. Same for
software. And he breaks ours.

Thanks Bill.

I was just reading that right before Russia invaded
Georgia, there was a cyberattack on Georgia's basic
network infrastructure launched from the Botnets that
Bill Gates created through the above policies. I can
only conclude that Microsoft's ongoing refusal to make
a version of windows that cannot be remotely controlled
by criminals is now a serious threat to our national
security

That's funny,

No it isn't. One researcher found that 80% of the traffic
on the Internet was botnets:
[ http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/ ].

Another estimates that around 25% of computers on the
net are infected and are part of botnets:
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6298641.stm ]

One botenet alone is sending 60 billion spam emails per day:
[ http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/topbotnets/ ]

Not even slightly funny

our entire network of thousands of PC
across ten cities and spanning several companies, is
all Windows, and we have secure networks.

Factual claims by anonymous Usenet posters are not
evidence. We have no way of evaluating the claim.
In particular, we j=have no assurance that you have
the ability to detect a botnet running on your network.
See _Botnets Don Invisibility Cloaks_ at
[ http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=113849 ].
One researcher estimates that virus/malware scanners only
detect about 75 percent of malware.
[ http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=122116&WT.svl=news1_1]

Certainly secure Windows networks do exist -- I have
one in my home lab. It isn't hard to do, either; just
set up a hardware firewall (FreeSCO is good) a sowtware
firewall (Zone Alarm is good) and a malware scanner
(Kaspersky is good), keep up with the updates, and don't
download from untrusted sources, and Bob's your uncle.

The problem is that you have to take extra steps such as
descibed above to secure Windows. When grandma buys a
new PC and runs it on a DSL line for a few years without
updating it, it becomes part of a botnet. And there are
a *lot* of grandmas out there.

Also see:
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-001.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet

Just so you know, I use Linux as well.

That's interesting. Not many Linux users have
"X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 4.2/32.1118" in their
headers. Some do, though; Forte Agent runs under
WINE if you don't mind it crashing on close...

You WinHater FuckTards really make me sick.

Why would you become so emotionally involved over
someone's OS preference?

So is Bill a businessman, or a thief?

You probably aren't aware that I am a libertarian.
A transaction where a willing buyer buys something
-- even if that something is crap -- from a willing
seller can never be theft.

Remember, your answer tells us a lot about your character.

No it doesn't.



--

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's
game because they almost always turn out to be -- or to be
indistinguishable from -- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds
possessing infinite amounts of free time."
-Neil Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_
Guy Macon
<http://www.GuyMacon.com/>

.