How much longer..

Hi.. just think if the billions of dollars being spent on M$
products could have been funneled into open source projects.

To reinforce the point in the most blunt manner possible:

No one had ever better dare postulate that the inherent reason
for all of the vulnerabilities in Micro$oft products are due
to any special features of note.

There is no particular network-enabled feature that Windows has
that UNIX didn't implement years before and has done so securely
following established internet design standards adopted by the
ruling standards body (IETF) after intense study and open participation
from all parties who were interested.

Now knee-jerk reactions by various network operators is to
filter, filter, filter and soon, by the grace of a piece of
crap operating system you'll have a much more limited internet
to work with because for Micro$oft's sake they've filtered everything.

What makes it all ironic is that you can directly thank Micro$oft if
the governments decide to pass more draconian laws, even further
criminalizing activities which were considered marginally criminal to
begin with.

Instead of subsidizing the monopoly, keeping sub-standard operating
systems alive, they should fine them billions of dollars for the
cost of repairing damages, managing overloaded network and system
infrastructures (due to the effects of the latest vulnerability).

The governments should cease using all Micro$oft products and go
back to UNIX which can easily be transformed into a "friendly"
operating system for business users (it already has been of course)
For the millions of dollars that are spent buying this fake operating
system with it's fake applications the government could subsidize
development of open software whose quality and security would far
exceed that of the closed source garbage that has become "standard"
in today's offices.

Their operating systems were a joke 10 years ago, and they're still
a joke today. The people administering these systems need to start
learning UNIX and colleges need to go back to teaching computer
science based around a real operating system. It's embarassing
for a recent graduate to only know how to point and click while
UNIX hackers are unemployed thanks to the disease that is called
Micro$oft.

Not to mention watching weeks of Micro$oft admins wondering publicly
on Full Disclosure (soon to be renamed Microsoft Whining and Crying)
what to do about their systems that they can't protect because those
systems are rotten to the core with garbage code written by fake
programmers who were trained by Universities who use Micro$oft operating
systems to teach their curriculum and who are managed by ex-vms
programmers (Uncle Bill hired them to write Windows Code)

Hey I like MS bashing as much as anyone else but the fact is you could say this
of any vendor.. a good recent example being Cisco

Well, two things here..

First, UNIX has more than it's share of vulnerabilities. For those of
you who can remember the "HP Bug a day" list? Or how about the
numerous problems with sendmail or BIND? Sure, all these problems have
been corrected as they've been discovered but I wouldn't wanna take
odds on how many older instances of these programs exist. And the
vulnerabilities still come in for local users from the various OS
vendors. Not to mention various problems with IP stacks and so forth.

For those of you who think this is just a windows problem, think
again. The reason for the severity of impact is simply because of the
pervasiveness of the single OS. You don't find these things under UNIX
simply because it's too hard to make it work. (You have so many
different OS varients, people running different MTA's, web servers,
nameservers, etc, etc.) With Microsoft, it has become so ubiquitous
that it's easy to find 10,000 servers running the same buggy stuff in a
short period of time.

Second: Isn't OS bashing just a bit off topic?

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Hash: SHA1

Or perhaps the recently disclosed compromise of ftp.gnu.org? A Unix
(or Unix-Like) system running software based on established internet
design standards adopted by the ruling standards body (IETF) after
intense study and open participation from all parties who were
interested.

And to the people who think that Unix only has a budget of about $1
million and Microsoft should do better with their $60 billion budget
(or however big it is)...guess again. IBM, Sun, HP...those names
ring any bells?

When you come up with a secure replacement, let us know, because *nix
certainly ain't it. Doesn't matter how rabid a proponent of MS, or
Red Hat, or Sun, or SUSE you are, ignoring that fact is a quick way
to get rooted.

- --
William S. Duncanson caesar@starkreality.com
The driving force behind the NC is the belief that the companies who
brought us things like Unix, relational databases, and Windows can
make an appliance that is inexpensive and easy to use if they choose
to do that.
- -- Scott Adams