-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Roger Marquis Sent: January 28, 2004 10:37 PM To: nanog@trapdoor.merit.edu Subject: Re: in case nobody else noticed it, there was a mail worm released today
(Note: I really do not want this to degenerate into another rant against vendor M;
Sorry for not sharing your disinterest in the actual reasons we continue to see these viruses and trojans infecting MS and, for all intents and purposes, only MS operating systems.
If Microsoft is the problem, you care to tell me why I haven't gotten infected by a single one of those emailed viruses/worms/trojans despite years of running MS software? (And for that matter, neither have my parents... Apparently, years of yelling at them that 3+ meg binary "Christmas cards" from their friends were not worth opening, or their friends learned the hard way and hence stopped sending them) I don't think my MS software is any different from anyone else's, except that A) I don't open .SCR attachments B) I actually believe Windows/Office Update is for me, not for the random dude/gal working down at the Burger King down the street. So why is it that idiots doing/not doing these things can't be the problem, but MS must be? And, care to tell me why, as someone else pointed out, if I were to switch to Evolution on your random GNU/Linux distribution, someone couldn't write a similar worm. The reason they don't do it is because there isn't a critical mass of Evolution/GNU/Linux/glibcX.Y to make a big stink... And there is such a critical mass for MS. Let me put it this way: if you know one bank has 100 million dollars in the vault, and another has 5000 dollars, wouldn't you expect most of the bank robbers to focus on robbing the first bank, irrelevant of whether the first bank's fault is better protected than the second's? Vivien -- Vivien M. vivienm@dyndns.org Assistant System Administrator Dynamic Network Services, Inc. http://www.dyndns.org/