I have to agree with Ejay. Microsoft is not the only software vendor. It seems silly to argue that one OS is better than the other. Linux needs to be patched to, as do all the various flavors or Unix, solaris, etc from time to time and with varying degrees of urgency. This is a fact of life. Dan -----Original Message----- From: Ejay Hire [mailto:ejay.hire@isdn.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 10:53 To: Len Rose; *Hobbit* Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: How much longer..

From my perspective, I don't care what defective operating system a worm uses.

If a malevolent worm is spreading via a vulnerability in IIS and I can keep from answering support calls by blocking it at the edge I will. If one of the 31337 crowd ever catches a clue and launches a worm that spreads via the OpenSSH vulnerability, I'll block that too. My objective in blocking is not to bail Microsoft out, my objective is to make sure the people I work with can accomplish useful work and don't have to spend days repeatedly explaining how to download a patch and remove msblast.exe. For the record, I have two folders that catch Microsoft security bulletins and Red hat package update notifications. Right now the score is close at MS 12 vs RH 9. -e -----Original Message----- From: Len Rose [mailto:len@netsys.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 12:26 PM To: *Hobbit* Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: How much longer.. Hi.. just think if the billions of dollars being spent on M$ products could have been funneled into open source projects. To reinforce the point in the most blunt manner possible: No one had ever better dare postulate that the inherent reason for all of the vulnerabilities in Micro$oft products are due to any special features of note. There is no particular network-enabled feature that Windows has that UNIX didn't implement years before and has done so securely following established internet design standards adopted by the ruling standards body (IETF) after intense study and open participation from all parties who were interested. Now knee-jerk reactions by various network operators is to filter, filter, filter and soon, by the grace of a piece of crap operating system you'll have a much more limited internet to work with because for Micro$oft's sake they've filtered everything. What makes it all ironic is that you can directly thank Micro$oft if the governments decide to pass more draconian laws, even further criminalizing activities which were considered marginally criminal to begin with. Instead of subsidizing the monopoly, keeping sub-standard operating systems alive, they should fine them billions of dollars for the cost of repairing damages, managing overloaded network and system infrastructures (due to the effects of the latest vulnerability). The governments should cease using all Micro$oft products and go back to UNIX which can easily be transformed into a "friendly" operating system for business users (it already has been of course) For the millions of dollars that are spent buying this fake operating system with it's fake applications the government could subsidize development of open software whose quality and security would far exceed that of the closed source garbage that has become "standard" in today's offices. Their operating systems were a joke 10 years ago, and they're still a joke today. The people administering these systems need to start learning UNIX and colleges need to go back to teaching computer science based around a real operating system. It's embarassing for a recent graduate to only know how to point and click while UNIX hackers are unemployed thanks to the disease that is called Micro$oft. Not to mention watching weeks of Micro$oft admins wondering publicly on Full Disclosure (soon to be renamed Microsoft Whining and Crying) what to do about their systems that they can't protect because those systems are rotten to the core with garbage code written by fake programmers who were trained by Universities who use Micro$oft operating systems to teach their curriculum and who are managed by ex-vms programmers (Uncle Bill hired them to write Windows Code) On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 11:42:59AM +0000, *Hobbit* wrote:

I often ask the larger question, "how long will it take for millions of people to realize that having to deal with winbloze has completely *derailed* their careers for the last ten years, when they could have been doing so much more productive things on their jobs?"

But evidently most of them can't think that deep, and get all defensive about it.

If all those people had been contributing to free and better replacements in the linux/bsd/open-source arena, we'd be *so* much farther ahead, and would have saved countless dollars that are now in Bill's pocket.

_H*