Bonum Certa Men Certa

Killer Feature of Microsoft Windows: It Can Kill Patients

Novell race track



Summary: More victims of Conficker ("dozens of hospitals") and no real solutions to this from Microsoft

IN recent months we've come across many cases where hospitals went awry due to their use and/or dependence on Microsoft Windows. To give as examples some recent posts, we have:

  1. New Casualties of Microsoft Windows?
  2. Death by Microsoft Windows
  3. US Army Becomes Zombies Army; London Hospitals Still Ill (Windows Viruses)
  4. Utah Has Novell, SCO, and... Conficker in the Hospitals
  5. Windows in the Emergency Room


Here are some new ones for the list:

1. Feds' red tape left medical devices infected with computer virus

The Conficker Internet virus has infected important computerized medical devices, but governmental red tape interfered with their repair, an organizer of an antivirus working group told Congress on Friday.


2. Conficker worm hits hospital devices

A computer worm that has alarmed security experts around the world has crawled into hundreds of medical devices at dozens of hospitals in the United States and other countries, according to technologists monitoring the threat.


So, according to that last article, "dozens of hospitals in the United States and other countries" are affected. This is serious. There a lot more about Conficker in the news this week, e.g.:



Where is Microsoft in all this?

Internet security experts say that the computer worm known as Conficker, which has the ability to silently penetrate vulnerabilities within the Microsoft operating system, is beginning to rear its ugly head.

They say that the software is installing new and malicious programs on some of the computers it has already invaded with the aim of using those PCs to send out criminal spam and scrounge around on unsecured computers for valuable personal data, Reuters reported Friday.

[...]

Experts say that the Conficker worm has already dug into millions of PCs but only been activated in a small percent of them. It was feared that the makers of the software program would trigger a massive attack on April 1. While that didn’t happen, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said earlier this month that it has detected a new variant of the worm that “updates earlier infections via its peer-to-peer network against unpatched systems.”


Microsoft is awkwardly quiet, having ignored lots of trouble that we also covered in:



Microsoft only works on improving its perception through work on 'security' (not the same as actually making its products secure), sparingly using the term "memorandum of understanding" to describe eventhis latest deal:

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC] and Microsoft yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding [MoU] to jointly combat internet crime in Nigeria. This was disclosed in a joint press briefing of the EFCC and representatives of Microsoft held at the headquarter of the anti-corruption agency.


There is also this report:

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and Microsoft on Thursday in Abuja signed a Memorandum of Understanding to curb internet crime and piracy in Nigeria.


Microsoft should quit lying about what it calls "piracy". Moreover, it should pay attention to Conficker because it harms not only its own customers; it also bothers users of other operating systems, more or less as a side effect on the Internet.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
 
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding
some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows)
The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux
It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025)
We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products
Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window)
They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash
Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful
We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware)
Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot
Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers
In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer