OT: Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 03:42:36PM -0400, Thomas Milne wrote:
> One point that's missed a _lot_ in these discussions is that using
> Windows is _not_ a victimless crime. I don't think that it is at all
> 'smug' or overly pious to remind Windows users that their choice has a
> huge impact on the overall ecology of the Internet. The botnets that
> plague us with spam, ddos attacks, and all the other worms, malware
> (and lions and tigers and bears, oh my) are a direct result of
> Microsoft's monopolistic and proprietary shenanigans.

Microsoft has made many decisions on what features to enable by default
(usually all of them) in order to avoid tech support costs when someone
can't figure out how to enable something.  The cost of this bad decision
security wise is harder to measure, so Microsoft simply hasn't cared.
It's not their time and money being wasted after all.

> I am at a loss to explain how anyone could equate the sometimes
> zealous promotion of Mac or Linux superiority with the ignorance that
> perpetuates Microsoft's dominance.
> 
> If Windows users are sick of hearing about how crappy their OS is,
> well, I don't really care. I guess people who used 8-track tapes were
> sick of hearing about how crappy their technology was too, and look
> where they are now.

Sure.  Of course you would need people to take responsibility for their
actions for anything to change.  Like realizing that opening stupid
attachments is not a good idea.  Realizing that forwarding clearly
false information to all your friends just because an email says so is
not a good idea.  Like realizing that giving money for products in spam
causes spam.  Just because you don't care about having spyware and viruses
on your machine doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't care about
what it makes your machine do.  Unfortunately many windows users don't
understand this and all too often simply don't care to learn anything
about it.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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