First, Windows ME by some definitions can't be rooted, since it only has
one user.
Think of it as a feature, not a bug. ;)
Second, any worms that might do any sort of automatic "rooting" almost
certainly do NOT apply to the dos-based versions of windows. From
sarc.com about blaster worm:
I've noticed this a lot. It's as if Windows XP with the release of SP2
had finally caught up with the high security of Windows 98.
The only people who have it right are OSX and a few linux
distributions. OSX has no open ports by default. Almost all Linux
distributions have ssh enabled by default, which has had a few
exploits. I strongly believe that ALL open ports should be an opt-in
policy and not an opt-out/firewall policy.
I use Kanotix, which installs ssh-server, but doesn't run it by default.
Indeed, it doesn't run networking by default, which makes it one of the
most secure OSes I know of. ;) Still, I tend to go through and uninstall
a lot of stuff I, or the user won't need.
As for Windows 98, I still use it, as does my daughter. I use it for
reference works that aren't available on Linux. My daughter uses it for
running software that her school mandates that won't run on Linux, and
which has trouble running on Wine. It runs under Qemu. It's slow, but
not too bad. I run it with the "-net none" option. It's quite "secure"
that way.
btw. Windows 98 almost never crashes when running under Linux.
--
Hawaiian Astronomical Society: http://www.hawastsoc.org
HAS Deepsky Atlas: http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky
