Anarchoblogs in English

Now, instead of patching (something that probably should have never been a security issue)…

Microsoft is offering a $250,000 reward for the information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the creator(s) of the infamous Conficker/Downadup worm.

First, the responsible parties are already in the wind, to be honest. He/she/they were in the wind by the time the handlers knew something was wrong. That’s just a realistic observation. You can talk about “fighting malware authors” as much as you want, but at some time we all have to, in the words of Lewis Black, “agree on what the fuck reality is.”

Second, it’s literally heaping another $250,000 on top of already sunk costs. It adds cost insult to cost injury. Sure, Microsoft can claim euphemistically that they’re broadening their responses to malware infections, but this rings so hollow:

“As part of Microsoft’s ongoing security efforts, we constantly look for ways to use a diverse set of tools and develop methodologies to protect our customers,” said the general manager of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, George Stathakopoulos, in a statement. “By combining our expertise with that of the broader community we can expand the boundaries of defense to better protect people worldwide.”

I sort of understand the rationality, but I just fail to see how this in any way makes business sense. Even if this character or these characters are brought to “justice” (whatever Microsoft & Co. mean by that), so what? What are they going to do to him/her/them? Spank them?

It’s the rough equivalent of swatting a wasp when you have a hive under your front porch. Even if you literally crucify the wrongdoers on telephone polls it’s still a sunk cost.

Come on, Microsoft. Patch, move on, and put that $250,000 into making sure this shit doesn’t happen again. Stop with the vindictive digital hitlisting. This is not a “tool” that will help protect Microsoft’s customers – it will waste their money; even if it pans out and the responsible folks are “found,” that won’t magically quarantine all the infected machines. If Microsoft customers had any sense, this would raise at least a bit of ire.

It’s like a ten-year old got put in charge of some twisted Corleone family and threw a hissy fit when one of his grunts got hit. There’s no better way to slap your paying customers in the face than to put a digital hit out on one of a million malware authors.

Grandstanding. Digital gunboat diplomacy. Throwing around a quarter million dollar bounty will not make Windows a secure operating sytsem.

The people who crafted the worm are laughing.

PS – Dear Microsoft: Since you’re in the mood for slinging around the money I have paid you in the past, how about you take a few dollars of that $250,000 and send me a few copies of XP Pro?

Just a quick thought…

Via Digg:

The Futian People’s Court in Shenzhen, China, handed down sentences to 11 ringleaders of the world’s largest software counterfeiting syndicate today.

The pirates were responsible for manufacturing and distributing more than an estimated $2 billion (£1.4 billion) worth of ‘high-quality’ counterfeit Microsoft software.

Their sentences, which ranged from a year and a half to 6.5 years, are the longest ever handed down for intellectual property crimes in China.

…on behalf of American corporations, mind you.

First, consider that Chinese courts are handing down rulings at the behest of an American corporation. Then consider that the common argument in favor of the state is that some organization needs to have a monopoly on the use of force in a given geographical location.

Excuse me while I attempt to shake this overwhelming sense of irony. Fill in why.

Aspire One, in Seashell White and Sapphire Blue.

A late birthday/early Christmas gift for me was a shiny new white Acer Aspire One, one of the forerunners of the so-called “netbooks.” My model has a 160GB hard drive, 1GB of memory, and Windows XP Home. As with all other Aspire One models, it has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270. I got mine with a 6-cell battery.

Really, it’s been great so far. I love the concept of the “netbook” even if I’m not a big fan of the buzzword (or, for that matter, the catch-phrase “cloud computing“).

My old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6000, was a good enough laptop, and exactly what I needed when I bought it, but I got to the point of seeking something far more mobile. And, considering my trusty old Inspiron dumped two batteries and two A/C adapters, thus making it far less useful qua mobile computer, I wanted something with God-like battery life (and if not God-like, as close as possible). My old laptop had been in a state of battery-lessness for about 6 months, and the A/C adapter was going, too. Rather than dump the money to replace another battery and A/C adapter (which may have died after a few months too), which would have been more than half of a decent new netbook, I decided to give up the ship. Not sure if I’ll ever buy a Dell laptop again, but somehow I doubt it. Anyway…

Mobility is the idea behind these subnotebooks, netbooks, ULCPCs, or whatever term you prefer. Naturally, I wanted one, and my decreasing trust in my aging workhorse laptop coincided. In any case, some thoughts on my Aspire One after  a few days’ use:

Pros

• It is small! But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The keyboard and the touchpad will take some getting used to. As another example, the home and end keys occupy the space just to the right and left of the up arrow, sharing a key with PgUp and PgDn, necessitating using the Fn key for use. One of those things that will take getting used to.
• Great battery life. If you get one, I strongly advise getting the 6-cell battery. It’ll make the machine heavier, true, but it’s hard to argue with 4+ hours of battery life. The spec pages slate it at 5-5.5+ hours, but that’s likely under low load. The longest I drained it was 3-3.5 hours of constant use, and when I stopped working on it, the meter claimed the battery had another 25% left.
• Almost all the hardware worked great out of the box, the only exception being wireless flakiness that went away with a driver upgrade (see below). The resolution is great considering it is a small monitor. The USB 2.0 is, well, as fast and functional as we’ve come to expect from the standard, and the presence of card readers (for which I have occasional use) is nice.
• Convenient switch for the wireless on the front right. Also, the Fn key handles a lot of cool toggles and hardware settings (brightness, volume, etc.).
• Handles multitasking well. While the wireless was initially being flaky, the performance dipped (general TCP/IP confusion no doubt ticking off the XP kernel), but with that problem fixed, not a problem. I’m doing fine with Firefox open (multiple tabs), Abiword, several file transfers over the network, Foobar2k, and Pidgin.

Cons

• Flaky wireless at first. I did all the Windows Updates shortly after first boot, and the wireless got flaky sometime during the update-and-reboot process. The wireless was so flaky that the performance of the machine dipped quite a bit - no doubt Windows wasting processor cycles trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. In any event, finally I went to the Windows Update site again and updated my wireless drivers (and the wired ones for good measure) from the official Windows update site. After a reboot, things are much smoother - smooth enough that I’m running several apps without incident.
• The two USB ports on the right side (for the record, a third is on the left) are too close together. I can’t fit my PNY Attache and the dongle from my wireless USB mouse in the side-by-side USB ports. Not a huge deal - I usually only use two USB devices at a time simultaneously, so I can plug one into either side and be okay.
• I’m just not digging the touchpad, but I’ve become used to carrying a wireless USB mouse in my laptop case these days anyway. Maybe it’ll grow on me - the buttons being on the left and right side (not underneath) will take some getting used to.
• I would consider the slight bloatware to be a minor gripe - at the same time I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised how little there was. Certainly by no means the worst I’ve seen, and besides ditching McAfee, not much of a problem.
• Minor gripe: Systray glut. Relatively easy to clear up (see the previous item).

Other Thoughts

• The first boot was sort of a  slow process, predictably. It seemed to take this order: BIOS POST, of course, then boot up Windows; here, the familiar Windows OEM “what’s your name” and “name your computer”  stuff. At this point, I believe there was a reboot. Finally, the normal user account was auto-logged in, at which point an Acer-provided batch file initialized driver installation. Patience, my son.
• Why Office 2007? This one just seems like a “I’m Microsoft’s bitch” statement. Mine shipped with a trial copy of Office 2007 (Home and Student crippleware, I believe). Kind of invites the question, “hey, isn’t the idea cloud computing?” The office suite is supposed to be on the cloud, I thought. Not really a gripe, but just a thought. With the 160GB hard drive, to be fair, I must say that it almost makes this little guy sort of a hybrid netbook. Oddly, it doesn’t feel out of place that I’ve already installed a couple dozen apps to the hard drive.
• Flash seems to bog the processor down a bit. Still, I am more inclined to blame Flash more than I am inclined to blame this laptop, the processor, or even Windows.
• I haven’t put it through its paces yet, so I’m waiting (and hoping) that I’ll be able to do some light virtual machine work on the machine considering how much we use virtualization at school. I’ve heard of people gaming on them lightly, so maybe some VBox or VMware tinkering will go decently.
• The presence of a hidden recovery partition is usually, for my purposes, not really welcome. But in this case, when the machine doesn’t ship with XP install disks and has no optical drive, the presence of the recovery partition to restore defaults is a nice little warm-and-fuzzy. (Still, I am going to see about getting a copy of my install disks sent to me so that I can slipstream a USB-booted, lightweight spin of WinXP using nLite.)

All in all, I love it. The Aspire One has been out for awhile, and from what I’m seeing so far, Acer has its ducks in a row. I’m hoping my glowing fawning over my new toy continues.