Friday Five

After doing some more reading, I discovered that rigelkitty had gotten those questions from http://www.fridayfive.org/, which posts new questions for people to answer every Friday. What a neat idea! And, on to the questions!

1. When was the last time you laughed?

Out loud? Yesterday morning on the radio. They had a segment on the morning show of WMMR called "things that one of our DJs will never say". And one of the things was, "I now understand the gentle philosophy of the conservative movement and the sheer genius of George W. Bush". I just about fell over from laughing.

2. Who was the last person you had an argument with?

My boss, last night. We were discussing how threads in Python handle signals, and how there were problems when Procmurder tried killing them off. My boss made a remark to the effect of, "Gee, maybe we shouldn't use Python if it can't handle signals being sent to children". When you are a manager, you DO NOT say things like that after someone has spent several weeks working on a project! Talk about hurting morale. I'm still irked about that.

3. Who was the last person you emailed?

Scott Hazen Mueller, a colleague of mine who runs spam.abuse.net and is also the Chair of CAUCE. The e-mail was about some configuration issues and blocking the latest worm that has been making the rounds.

4. When was the last time you bathed?

You mean took a shower? This morning.

5. What was the last thing you ate?

Honey-nut Cheerios and a Banana, washed down with Metamucil. :-)

Viruses: Microsoft is the problem, folks

1994: People laugh at the GoodTimes virus, because everyone knows viruses can't spread through email!
1995: Word macro viruses first created, and now viruses are easier to write than ever before. Meanwhile, Microsoft has plenty of time to figure out how to prevent them, especially since their users hardly ever use macros in the first place, and especially not to, say, destroy the Windows registry or something.
1996: Macro viruses spread to the extent that Microsoft distributes them as well--unwittingly, we hope.
1997: Word '97 released; the dawn of VBA viruses.
1998: With over 1,000 word macro viruses out there, it's worth making virus scanners for them!
1999: Melissa word macro virus spreads over email and infects Word thanks to Microsoft; as they mention, if you don't use Outlook, you're safe. If you do use Outlook, you might get infected without ever looking at the attachment yourself; previewing it may be enough.
2000: The love bug virus spreads over email thanks to Microsoft Outlook, and causes an estimated $8.7 billion in damage.
2001: Code Red spreads, attacking Windows NT and 2K. Sircam emails itself absolutely everywhere, again thanks to Microsoft.
2002: Klez and Nimda spread.
2003: You guessed it, even still yet more viruses spreading faster than ever, thanks to Windows, Outlook, Word, blah, blah, blah.

(Courtesy of Slashdot)

And what's Microsoft done about their products being able to spread viruses and worms so easily? Not much. For a company where "security is their top priority" (or whatever Gates is spewing now), their actions speak louder than their words. Their actions state that they don't give a crap about their customers or the havoc that their negligently desisgned programs wreak on the Internet. Their actions state that they would rather add new bells and whistles into the latest copy of MS Office and MS Lookout! (er, Outlook), as opposed to fixing some serious problems that have been inherant in the systems for several years.

I run Linux at home, and I still suffer. I've had hundreds of copies of the latest worm e-mailed to me since the beginning of the week. At work, our company has gotten THOUSANDS of copies of the worm e-mailed to us. It costs us disk space, bandwidth, and lost employee productivity to deal with the problem.

Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for creating a mess that the rest of us have to clean up.

Essay question: When automobile makers make products that spew obnoxious amounts of pollution into the atmosphere, they get in trouble. Why is it okay that Microsoft be allowed to make products that spew obnoxious amounts of crap onto the Internet?