Microsoft Must be held accountable.

[Keith Mastin]

<quote who="JoeHill">
<snip>
> We won't be for long with that kind of complacent attitude. MS is intent
> on making Linux, OSS, and the GPL for all intents and purposes illegal.
> Witness their latest proxy attack using SCO, calling OSS "communist",
> getting into bed with Bush and Ashcroft to make sure all us "hackers"
> are kept in line.

Doesn't matter now. All they can really control is the US dominated
market. It's not enough to keep the tiger in the cage. M$ is doomed to
change.

>> > I already block all mail from Outlook unless it is from a known
>> > person or list, and there are ways to make websites inaccessible to
>> > IE (there must be, if there are ways to do the reverse), which I am
>> > going to look into.
>>
>> You are moving up your leg from shooting yourself in the foot. Don't
>> aim too high. :)
>
> Why is that? 99% of the spam I get is from Outhouse. IE is a known
> propagator of malicious code, in fact it's so easy to do that all you
> have to do is load a properly mined web page to infect your system, and

Something like 85% of the world is using M$ on the desktop, most of them
with default settings. If you lock them out of your site, the recursive
hits will reflect how big the impact is. You will have no impact on the
effectiveness of the spammers. Better to make an offer to teach people how
to secure a windows box and throw linux at them as a viable alternative.

> the latest MS patch for this vulnerability doesn't even work, MS says
> "they're working on it...". Why would I want to encourage people to use
> such a thing? Have you checked your Apache logs lately? Do you ever run
> snort or ethereal? Infected Windows crap is eating up bandwidth like

I run an IDS on my home network all the time, and just my firewall logs
are horrendous on the co-lo'd servers. I know what you mean, but you also
have to remember that broadcasting is the nature of ethernet. It
*_seemed_* like a good idea at the time.

I'm gonna put that greylisting thing that Fraser posted into effect on my
mailserver soon. If I can drop 90% of email bandwidth from coming in the
gate I'll be happy. I already use enough bandwidth as it is. I also run a
secure mailserver that makes it impossible to spam anyone more than 50
messages at a time, and I get notified when that happens. And the webmail
system blocks all executable attachements and scans for viruses, so I'm
pretty much satisfied that I'm not a part of the problem.

> there's no tomorrow, and I'm supposed to put up with this? It takes me 3
> minutes to send an e-mail sometimes because my ISP is so overloaded with
> pondscum emanating from compromised XP boxes.

Your ISP owns the physical layer locally. They have the $$ to put a couple
big Sun boxes in with postfix to relay the mail. Talk to them.

> This is not just going to work itself out, it's about time some people
> started messing up MS's bed.

You are dangerously approaching cyber-terrorism. Our fix is proactiveley
using education and community support to combat M$ism. If we resort to the
same tactics as those we would prefer to see shut down, what does that
make us?

We complain when the government makes a document available only in M$ word
format. If we complain to the right people, we might actually accomplish
something.

-- 
Keith
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