Re: Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

Welcome to the Internet. You are so not in charge. And being a straight-talking, no holds barred guy is not the same as being rude. Your post is the latter.

There are billions of hosts connected to the Internet and they’re running whatever they feel like, and nobody’s asked you. People use Windows because it works for them. Unix and Linux don’t unless you layer a huge layer of GUI makeup to hide the ugliness away, as in Mac OS, iOS and Android. I’ve been using Unix with makeup since 2000 BTW, but Windows bashing is so 2006.

Your argument does not hold water. Spam existed long before botnets. It’s the anti-spam measures that those IT professionals have been using that have forced spammers to seek other means of distribution such as botnets. If they didn’t use that, they’d use something else, or else we’d see more things like Flashback or that Java botnet that runs everywhere. I get tons of span because my email address is posted in a lot of places on the Internet: IETF mailing lists, I-Ds and RFCs. It makes economic sense to send spam to people like me (some of us take the bait), so the spammers will do it one way or another. Unpatched Windows systems are an easy target for them, but eliminating those will not solve the spam problem.

Yoav

On May 19, 2014, at 8:30 AM, Eric Dynamic <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Meanwhile I notice that hundreds of IT professionals spin their wheels over
> standards and practices for dealing with spam, which is otherwise preventable,
> namely, let's cut the crap and go to first casuses: why there is spam/crime to
> the extent that there is: bad software running user PCs worldwide.
> 
> Get rid of Microsoft software connected to the Internet and the worldwide
> "bot-net" problem will go away in a few months, as the criminal bots are
> tracked down and eliminated but NOT replaced.
> 
> Do not even begin to bother the issue of whether Unix/Linux can or cannot be
> invaded/compromised. Yes, it can, but to at most four orders of magnitude a
> lesser extent. Microsoft's mean time to the next exploit is 15 days (two weeks.)
> Unix's mean time to the next exploit is 2700 days (7.5 years.)
> Microsoft users are just recovering from any given virus when the next one hits.
> 
> There is just no excuse to keep using such awful software and then have to
> pretend that all the extra attendant nonsense ("anti-spamscience") is meaningful
> and necessary. I suggest we worldwide quit wasting man-hours and intelligence
> doing scutwork on an arms-race basis to keep Bill Gates's company looking
> at best adequate. The spam is their fault and they can't fix the reasons why.
> 
> So put their code in the garbage where it belongs and retire Microsoft into
> the Dustbin of History where it belonged 20 years ago.
> 
> This will free an enormous amount of now-wasted manpower to start doing more
> useful things. This would also greatly benefit the economy and the development
> of new PC technology, by the way, without regard to spam/crime.