Hatin'
I'm in a hatin' mood right now, which is not like me. I can't tell whether I'm more hatin' on the fuckwads that write viruses and worms like the 87 variants of Zotob out there or on Microsoft for being so incredibly security unconscious. I sometimes get to hatin' on my own group for being too damn slow to respond to publication of exploits and the patches to secure them, but this time the malware came so fast and furious that it is unreasonable to think that we could have prevented the outbreak that has affected many of our customers, including the one that I support. I personally have only been inconvenienced, but many, maybe most, of the folks in my company have gone through sheer hell the last week, many logging as much as 100 hours in the week, and it ain't over yet.Every time we go through one of these episodes (and this is turning out to be one of the worst), the question is raised as to whether we should continue to use/support Microsoft products. While I'm still not sure that Linux is ready for prime time as a user platform (I'm fully supportive of it as a server platform), I am thinking that moving from Microsoft applications is something that we could and probably should do today. Very few of my technically-inclined friends run MS browsers or email clients or productivity products at home. I've been running an old free version of StarOffice (the Sun version of OpenOffice) for a couple of years and it is almost indistinguishable from MS Office and does a tremendous job of converting from one to the other. I've been running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of IE and Outlook for months and there are only about 2 websites that I need to visit that don't format properly on Firefox and force me to use IE. So while I'm not quite ready to dump the Windows OS (there's no version of Dungeon Siege for Linux yet that I'm aware of), I'm fully supportive of dumping every other piece of crappy code they sell and will continue to suggest that my company and our customers do the same.
I know for some that it sounds like I'm blaming the victim (if you can imagine Microsoft as a victim) and I really do want to avoid that. The fuckwads (I can think of nothing else to call them) cost the global economy millions of dollars but what's even worse, they cause a lot of good innocent people to work their asses off, cancel vacations, miss their families, get stress-related illnesses and generally be miserable mostly for some dickhead's kicks. When they're caught, they should be punished commensurate with the crime - I'm thinking at least 30 years of hard time. If you just take one of our customers and add up the lost productivity of people who either had an infected PC taken off the network or a server that was critical to their work out of commission and add to that the hours spent remediating the problems caused by the malware or in preventing its further spread, you'd be up to 3.5 years of wasted time. And we had more than one customer affected. So maybe putting them away for life would be more appropriate. And it might save them from the angry mob of my fellows who would be more than willing to rip them apart limb from limb and hang them from butcher hooks in the town square.
1 Comments:
Watch yer mouth, pal - I know where you live... :-D
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