I dare to forward this longish piece not (only) for its due dose of M$uck rant, but for two other aspects - first, that it points to the madness with which public expenditure is drained by pseudo- "technological" manipulation, and secondly, because it's an indication of at least some Brits get fed up with a pseudo-"left" government that sells them lock, stock and barrel to one of the most rogue organisations existing.
But then - "XP" and the M$ proselytes will provide us with a real Tsunami of almost brand-new survPCs, <bg> // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2001-09-27 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net --------------------quote:-------------- http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,556375,00.html Unlocked - come in and help yourselves The Networker, John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday September 23, 2001 Let us get one thing straight: the Nimda worm/ virus which caused intermittent havoc last week is not - as innumerable media reports have put it - an 'internet worm/virus'. It is a Microsoft worm/virus. Only computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems, browsers and email programs, or Web servers running Microsoft IIS software, are vulnerable to the vicious little beastie. Nimda attacks at least a dozen known vulnerabilities in Microsoft IIS and can also spread via open shares to other connected machines on a network. Computers that do not run Microsoft software are not, repeat not, vulnerable to this particular attack. Using Microsoft email software is like putting a large billboard outside your house saying 'Unlocked - come in and help yourself'. This is not just an issue of semantics. By failing to identify the vulnerabilities of Microsoft software, the media give an impression of online security that is grossly misleading. And this has several serious consequences. First, it gives people the idea that all internet activity is intrinsically insecure - which reinforces their reluctance to buy things online. Second, it lets Microsoft off the hook. Instead of being pilloried (or prosecuted) for marketing insecure products, the company escapes public castigation because the internet is blamed for its corporate shortcomings. And third, journalistic misrepresentation of the real cause of Nimda-type vulnerabilities enables public authorities that are hooked on Microsoft products - such as our own dear e-envoy's office - to avoid critical scrutiny by overseers such as the National Audit Office. There is worse to come. On 25 October, Microsoft will launch its new XP operating system to a traumatised world. This is an astonishingly ambitious product - an attempt, as one of my techie colleagues put it, 'finally to do Windows properly'. It is also, however, a monster. If you were thinking of running it on your trusty two-year-old PC, for example, forget it. XP is, in the words of David Pogue of the New York Times, 'power-mad'. Microsoft's official minimum requirements are a 300-megahertz processor and 64 megabytes of memory. 'But that,' writes Pogue, 'is like saying that the minimum requirements for marriage are two adults and a blood test. Without at least 400 megahertz and 128 megabytes of Ram, Windows XP exhibits all the spunk of tomato paste. Note, too, that if your computer is more than about 18 months old, you may have to update its BIOS (a core nugget of computer code) before installing XP, a procedure about as user-friendly as a wet cat.' The public policy implications are obvious. Schools, hospitals and other publicly funded institutions will come under relentless pressure from New Labour's Microsoft junkies to upgrade to XP so that they can reap its putative 'benefits'. But in order to comply they must junk most of their existing PCs, which are perfectly adequate for their purposes, and would be for years to come if they ran non-Microsoft software. These difficulties pale into insignificance, however, alongside XP's potential to facilitate 'denial of service' attacks on a hitherto unimaginable scale. This is because its design allows programs to have what is called 'raw socket-level' access to the net. In non-technical terms this means that if computers running XP are penetrated by malicious hackers, they can be used as zombies to generate denial of service attacks that are much harder to detect and block than previous DoS attacks have been. Security expert Steve Gibson, who has been highlighting the problem for months, says: 'For the first time ever, applications running under the Home Edition of Windows XP will be easily able, without modifying the operating system in any way, to generate the most damaging forms of internet attacks.' Welcome to the future, Microsoft-style. [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.briefhistory.com/footnotes To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
