North American Network Operators Group

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RE: How much longer..

  • From: Ejay Hire
  • Date: Wed Aug 13 13:55:22 2003

>From my perspective, I don't care what defective operating system a worm
uses.

If a malevolent worm is spreading via a vulnerability in IIS and I can
keep from answering support calls by blocking it at the edge I will.  If
one of the 31337 crowd ever catches a clue and launches a worm that
spreads via the OpenSSH vulnerability, I'll block that too.  My
objective in blocking is not to bail Microsoft out, my objective is to
make sure the people I work with can accomplish useful work and don't
have to spend days repeatedly explaining how to download a patch and
remove msblast.exe.

For the record, I have two folders that catch Microsoft security
bulletins and Red hat package update notifications.  Right now the score
is close at MS 12 vs RH 9.

-e

-----Original Message-----
From: Len Rose [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 12:26 PM
To: *Hobbit*
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: 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)


On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 11:42:59AM +0000, *Hobbit* wrote:
> I often ask the larger question, "how long will it take for millions
> of people to realize that having to deal with winbloze has completely
> *derailed* their careers for the last ten years, when they could have
> been doing so much more productive things on their jobs?"
> 
> But evidently most of them can't think that deep, and get all
defensive
> about it.
> 
> If all those people had been contributing to free and better
replacements
> in the linux/bsd/open-source arena, we'd be *so* much farther ahead,
> and would have saved countless dollars that are now in Bill's pocket.
> 
> _H*