William T Goodall wrote:
>
> On Saturday, August 30, 2003, at 04:14 pm, Julia Thompson wrote:
>
> > William T Goodall wrote:
> >>
> >> On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 11:45 pm, Julia Thompson wrote:
> >>
> >>> He's under house arrest now. Article at
> >>>
> >>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=&e=2&u=/ap/20030829/
> >>> ap_on_hi_te/internet_attack
> >>>
> >>> Links to related articles on the same page.
> >>>
> >>> If he is convicted, I wouldn't mind the sentence including weekly
> >>> visits
> >>> from Bob the Dinosaur for awhile....
> >>
> >> An even better idea would be to arrest those at Micro$oft responsible
> >> for producing 'operating systems' with such hopelessly inadequate
> >> security features, and charge them with negligence.
> >
> > That'd be good. Then the cost of the sobig.f worn or virus or whatever
> > it technically is would be even *higher*. >:)
>
> If Micro$oft's negligence is why these costly security breaches occur,
> shouldn't Micro$oft be paying compensation? That is normally what
> happens when a company produces defective products isn't it?
Have you ever read a software license carefully? At least, a US one?
I'll see if I can dig one up and quote the relevant bit -- they're all
pretty much standard about liability, etc.
And I didn't make it clear, I realized -- M$ was estimating the worm
cost them $5-10 million. If we *could* sue them as easily as all that,
the cost of the worm would be *much* higher for *them*. (Even if all
that you could do was get back the cost of the OS, that would still
hurt.)
Julia
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
