How much longer..

Dan Lockwood dlockwood at shastalink.k12.ca.us
Wed Aug 13 18:53:07 UTC 2003


I have to agree with Ejay.  Microsoft is not the only software vendor.
It seems silly to argue that one OS is better than the other.  Linux
needs to be patched to, as do all the various flavors or Unix, solaris,
etc from time to time and with varying degrees of urgency.  This is a
fact of life.

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Ejay Hire [mailto:ejay.hire at isdn.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 10:53
To: Len Rose; *Hobbit*
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: RE: How much longer..



>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:len at netsys.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 12:26 PM
To: *Hobbit*
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
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*




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