*** ns2.nv.cox.net can't find www.windowsupdate.com: Non-existent host/domain
Some news outlets are reporting this is actually Microsoft's plan,
Sure it was, and it's probably the best thing MS could have done (for themselves AND the larger Internet) given the circumstances. After all, infected systems aren't going to stop scanning and DOS attacks from a huge number of compromised hosts targeting windowsupdate.com IPs is simply going to result in increased network utilization for a bunch of garbage traffic that'll either be dropped as a result of congestion on some networks, blackholed on others (from the folks that care no more about MS being DOS attacked then the next guy, but do care about their networks availability and the Internet in general), or hit some severely crippled server(s). MS has bugs, sure, and there's probably no excuse for lots of them. However, it could have been linux or any other OS. Folks give MS a hard time for the same reason they give Cisco a hard time -- because their products are nearly ubiquitous. I'm not going to dive into some huge rant here (others have articulated this point nicely already), some folks are much more passionate than I about the issue and I don't care to spend the cycles arguing something I care little about. MS isn't going away any time soon, like it or not, and the only way problems of this sort (that have been disclosed) are going to be cleanly resolved is by end users patching their systems. -danny PS: If folks are going to rant about MS products being horrible they might want to consider using non-MS products and posting to NANOG from non-MS mail clients/systems *8^).