12.02.09
Eye on Microsoft: “Protection Racket”, Lack of Security
Summary: New Microsoft links of interest
• Will racket ware shift the client-server balance?
This is racket as in protection racket. You got a lot of nice data in there, shame if something should happen to it. And you’re always under threat, from viruses, from trojans, from programs that want to capture your PC and use it to shoot spam at people or click on ads, and just from general clutter, what I call desktop dust bunnies.
A whole industry has risen to fight this menace. You can’t get away with just an anti-viral. You need a program that fights spyware and one that cleans your registry, too.
• Anti-spammers urged to gang up
In a comparative test, almost 200,000 sample emails were sent to 14 different anti-spam products that were required to filter out spam messages from legitimate smails (ham). The test found that no legitimate mail was blocked by more than four products.
• Steve Ballmer Rendered in BSODs
Needs Sunlight said,
December 2, 2009 at 9:33 am
Roy, the spam problem was solved back in 2006:
http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/bill-gates-in-2004-two-years-from-now-spam-will-be-solved/
Seriously, there are two causes of spam. Get them and you end the spam. The first cause is the business selling via spam. Come down on enough peddlers and spam revenues dry up. The second cause is the large number of Windows computers still attached to the network. Either disconnect them or, wiser, wipe them and replace with an OS designed for networked environments. The linux distros top the list, but there are others. That would have a side benefit of eliminating most if not all of the malware and be in practice an economic boost.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 am
Microsoft is currently attempting to dodge the malware epidemic it facilitated by running to other architectures/64-bit.