Sometimes the Internet just makes me laugh. In fact, the Internet often makes me laugh. Like this, for example:
Computers that are not protected or have been compromised with a bot put others at risk and pose a greater threat to society. … Simply put, we need to improve and maintain the health of consumer devices connected to the Internet in order to avoid greater societal risk.
Besides just being stupid at any level, I found myself raging to reply “If you hadn’t spent decades churning out shoddy operating systems, the world wouldn’t have this problem now.”
But the Internet had already taken care of this for me. There were three pages of replies when I visited, and I could count on one hand the number of posts that (even just vaguely) supported Scott Charney’s proposition.
The bulk — no, the overwhelming preponderance railed against Charney and Microsoft in general, for creating a problem the company apparently now says it can’t solve on its own. Good grief. 👿
You and I both know that it is possible to run a clean, safe and threat-free Windows system without relying on heaps and heaps of third-party software, resource-heavy system updates or endless tiers of firewalls.
You just pull the network plug out of the wall. 😈
I’m kidding, of course — but only in part: The simple, plain fact of the matter is I trust my 150Mhz Pentium running an outdated version of Feather Linux to navigate the Internet before any machine running any Microsoft product. Except maybe MS-DOS1.0.
You might feel Microsoft is an easy target these days, what with its recent history of sub-par releases. But Microsoft is a billion-dollar corporation, not some kid who did something dumb online and gets heckled as a result.
Gates and Ballmer built their fortunes by dumping a shoddy products on decades of computer users, and now they are suffering the backlash.
So if a billion people make a point of sending Scott Charney and Microsoft a little hate, via a blog comment, then I am afraid they will find no sympathy with me. You reap what you sow.
P.S.: Oh yeah, and this doesn’t help matters either. Stop thinking it’s cool not to understand something.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Honestly it’s possible to use modern Windows without (much) risk of infection or hacking. Just follow basic security best practices: keep it behind a hardware firewall (most routers have this by default), keep your passwords secret (and strong), keep your system up-to-date, and be careful what you download or install. If you do all of that, odds are you’ll be just fine. You should do all this on Linux/BSD/Mac/whatever too, for that matter. Just because malware is rare doesn’t mean you should blindly trust Joe Hacker’s magic shell scripts. 😉
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. While it’s true that Linux has some implementations that are safer than Windows (for example, installing all applications from a single trusted server instead of a multitude of sites)
Ultimately, it’s the user who determines how safe the system is. Not even Linux can remain undamaged if its user downloads everything s/he comes across.
I agree too. Linux by itself is, in a way, safer by design, but given that 99% of the security holes come from the human interface…
These Macrosoft leaders do deserve the hate, yes, but I guess they are not about to start crying…
What? Everyone knows viruses infect your hardware, and are completely platform independent! I plugged an infected mouse into a computer that had never been connected to the internet before, and it told me I had windows.win32 installed when I booted it!
Is is especially odd since I use Debian…
In regard to the above comment, I’d like to add a few things to the infection source list.
* ‘Drive by’ javascript, java, silverlight & other web page exploits that automatically installer malware without any more social engineering needed than visiting the infectious page.
* Transferring work on USB devices. A few of my neighbours have asked me to dis-infect their removable devices that contain a dozen or so copies of X trojan and an autorun file to execute them
* ‘Poisoning’ ( I believe it is called ). If the user uses un-encrypted ( or easily to crack passworded ) wifi you can inject packets of JS into their downloads, possibly of web pages, until desired effects occur.
Congrats, you earned a visit at your own website already, now, if you are happy with the results, stop trolling, please.
That blog is scary. Am I reading too much between the lines? Is Microsoft suggesting that an organization should be created that will get to decide who’s computer gets to connect to the net? If they get an “independent expert” to say Debian or some other OS is unsafe will all systems running that system be blocked? China should love this.
Hehehe, I got the same impression, it sounds like Al Capone proposing that all mob activities are “Prosecuted and terminated”.