Yes, yes. I saw the news. Microsoft disabled a botnet and now applauds itself for carving away 39 percent of the world’s spam.
I’m going to go out on a limb though. I say: If they hadn’t come up with such a long string of sub-par operating systems, thereby inventing both the opportunity to process huge volumes of spam, and the niche markets for anti-spam and security software … well, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
indeed
My god.
You must be a real treat to hang around with.
bitch and moan, bitch and moan.
Instead of criticising K.Mandla maybe you should read the article he links to. It’s written by a Microsoft representative.
More significant than K.Mandla writing a few thoughts about it, is the clever strategy found in the Microsoft blog post. For the not knowing the impression given is that Microsoft did a good deed for the general public of the Internet, while hiding any relation to what operating system Rustock compromise.
That was an informative, intelligent, educated counter-point you’ve made, Mike.
Do you have a link to your own personal blog so that we can follow anything and everything you’ve got to say?
“…successful pleading before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington…”
Sound like a publicity grab. MS can do this sort of thing any time they want to, and then people rant on about how ‘things like this ‘never happen in the linux world’ and how ‘Microsoft is really looking out for us’.
Practically, once they had succeeded in ‘pleading’, they probably just did what they were told to do by the government agencies. Their contribution would just be a few statistics, while the agencies would have done all of the hard work.
In fact, I’m sure MS could pay a room of employees to make Windows an almost impenetrable operating system within days, but that would not be profitable in the long run for MS.
Anyone who says Microsoft is doing something good should really put their view into perspective of what Microsoft could do. Microsoft’s attitude towards consumers is the reason I chose to try alternatives such as GNU/Linux in the first place, and now all they are doing are reinforcing my views and those of us with similar views.
“It’s like a gang setting up a drug den in someone’s home while they’re on vacation and coming back to do so every time the owner leaves the house, without the owner ever knowing anything is happening.”
Wow – I hadn’t noticed they changed to subject to Windows Update.
To the clueless Microsoft lover who said you were moaning and bitching-wake up and smell the coffee. It has been repeatedly proven that Microsoft and its sub par software products are full of security holes can not even keep up with Linux/GNU/BSD. These open source software products can do everything Microsoft and Apple can do except much better. The BEST things in life are truly FREE!
Yes, windows users are so trained by marketing that they don’t even see those things as problems anymore.
For them, its normal that a pc need to have an antivirus always on, that every few months you need to format and reinstall everything in order to have your pc usable, that you get BSODs out of the blue (a pun 😀 )
microsoft lovers are good trained users:
don’t question microsoft and look over your shoulder anyone who does.
just thank them for all the great things they do for you, and pay them for the exquisite privilege of using windows
MS has the most botnets because they have the most users. Don’t think for a second it wouldn’t be Linux machines doing the same thing if they had Window’s market share. It still comes down to the end user, and more times than not, the user is an idiot. MS has made good steps with Vista and Win7. Once XP is finally put out to pasture where it belongs, a lot of the problems will go away.
I’m still not convinced about this logic. Linux mail servers have been affected by some compromises, and as a target Linux servers should be among the best targets, since even if compromised in user space, their uptime is very long, and hence small annoyances aren’t flushed out by a reboot; the same is advantage if compromises seriously. Microsoft doesn’t have close to the same domination when we take into account all systems connected and making the Internet running.
Less XP systems will improve the situation somewhat, but I’ve already had enough of work fixing Vista and W7 systems to know that it isn’t any real cure. Pawn2own contests still proves that quality of code has an impact.
Microsoft isn’t doomed to fail security, but I’m still convinced a total rewrite from scratch is necessary to get it right from bottom to top. Windows’ legacy still goes back to the days security wasn’t a concern and the Internet wasn’t believed to become a major force (according to some important figures within Microsoft). Just the fact that one of the important tasks in later years have been to sort out the layers of the Windows kernel, making road for Windows Core (which still isn’t core in the same way we would understand a core Linux kernel) tells about the challenges Microsoft deal with. Also remember that Microsoft by choice hence have to maintain several kernels and operating systems, desktop, server, smartphone devices, and so on. Even for a wealthy company like Microsoft that’s a long-term problem.
Therefore I don’t see it as a Linux vs. Microsoft issue. Microsoft has their hands full to make development rolling and it won’t become easier. Security improvements have been made, but I think this situation indicates that Microsoft’s challenge is greater than the one Linux vendors deal with.
You make a good point indeed. Linux servers are among those in the most often attacked group of web, email and dns servers that malware producers go after. From ddos attacks to virii and trojans, etc… it’s not just the specific known OS that has historic security flaws that gets attacked.
It’s been reported regularly over the years the the majority of these types of servers are Linux servers, there Linux is dominant, not Microsoft and yet due to the nature of the opensource community, the nature of how these systems are secured and administered is a big part of how the problems and attacks on them are resolved quicker and with fewer dire results.
This is not to say that more aren’t custom made for Windows because of it’s enormous install base and it’s well known historic flaws that they slowly and intentionally drag their feet to change. There are, it’s true. But as the initial post says, are we not going to place responsibility on those who should have made the software better to begin with and made fixes sooner rather than much later?
No, MS gets no “cookie”, more like an “it’s about time”.
In my opinion a lot of attackers of any system prefer attacking windows because of a one size fits all approach. Thus making it much easier to design malware. I’m not saying that other operating systems re immune, but because the fragmentation on Linux among it’s diverse culture make it much more challenging to design malware for. Because Windows is is inherently less secure from the start users are targeted more.
It’s also a well known fact that windows still uses a lot of legacy software in it’s build. There are still 0 day flaws that have existed since Windows 3.1. If I were to compare Windows to Apple or Linux their RTM versions of their software is more like an alpha build, and not a true version. This was very apparent with Vista, Win95, and WinME.
If MS developers followed the Unix mantra MS software would be 10 time better, but they are so focused in getting newer version out there to make money that software is more or less forced on users. If they took the time to make it work well, and be stable I would gladly pay for MS software. WinXP was the only recent decent version on windows that was released after Win98 SE.
Anyone remember the fiasco of the Win95 floppy install? How about the incompatibilities of Win Vista, or how unstable Win ME was?
MS Windows was built to be a single user per system non-network OS, and they keep building on more features that don’t work great, and that isn’t stable. Another thing about windows is they don’t push updates as soon as they are available. It’s all a month-to-month deal. One other thing I think MS can do is go to a rolling update schedule, and release updates that are crucial immediately when the updates are proven stable.
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