Microsoft needs a vacation

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

July 27, 2001

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.....

I remember that saying they used to pitch the movie Jaws II. It should be modified for what's shaping up to be Microsoft's "endless summer of 2001". Just when it was safe to go back into cyber-space... Just as the number of shark sightings and attacks has increased this year, so has the number of virus/worm sightings and attacks - nasty things that target the Microsoft boaters and threaten to leave the rest of us who row with different oars high and dry.

I watched the evolution of the Code Red worm last Thursday with much the same interest as I watched the evolution of blizzards and hurricanes as a kid. I stayed up until some ungodly hour chatting with people about it on IRC, commenting on the Internet "weather report" sites. When I first saw it in my Apache logs here at home, I got in touch with one of our "gurus". He said 'Don't worry, it's an NT thing'. Contrary to what you may be thinking, my first act was not to begin boasting profusely and proudly that "I use Linux". I actually called a good friend of mine, a systems administrator who runs Win2000 and the IIS web server. I told him about it. He replied 'Yeh, I know about it.' He didn't really elaborate. He just let out a sigh. I guess the situation wasn't pretty. I feel bad for him because he is one of the many I feel who are stuck in a situation where they have to use IIS because the powers that be at their companies dictate that to them. There's nothing here to gloat over. It's really quite sad.

Just when it was safe to go back in the water.... the SirCam worm. This is a particularly nasty thing. Needless to say, I don't use Outlook. I don't even know what it looks like, luckily. Again, if you happen to be using Outlook, the contents of your hard disk starts getting sent to people in your address book and mail addresses that happened to be stored in your Internet Explorer cache. The bad thing is that it doesn't matter what platform you're using or what vendor's product, you're effected by this if your address happens to be in one of these two places on someone's Windows machine. Your in-box starts getting filled up with useless trash. Once again, a lot of people in corporate settings are forced to use Outlook as part of company policy. I would also assume that a lot of companies inform their workers about being careful with attachments but a lot of home users probably don't have a clue.

Speaking of not having a clue, it's interesting that Dennis E. Powell's article the other day at Linux Planet pretty much says that people who use Microsoft products are "clueless" and should be ostracized from the Internet. Believe me, this Windows sys admin friend of mine is really interested in looking for a better solution and is unfortunately running up against the proverbial corporate brick wall. I wouldn't place him in the "clueless" camp. I assume that people would rather not be forced to use something that could spread viruses either. They just want to keep their jobs. So do I. I understand this, particularly in this rather sluggish IT economy of late. I don't think this can be chalked up to just "clueless" people. You need to separate the "sinner from the sin", so to speak. I think a good dose of repentance in the form of a lesson on using Linux will do the trick. There's no need to cast out the clueless.

After these two weeks of cyber-space hell we've gone through I am convinced that Microsoft should take a vacation. It seems that some Microsoft employees may have already done so, despite being physically at work. Microsoft's own servers fell victim to the Code Red worm. As it turns out, Microsoft itself didn't apply its own patches. I saw a screenshot on [expletive-ed]company.com last Saturday. 'Hacked by Chinese!' Reminds me of the Spanish saying 'En casa del herrero, cuchara de palo' - roughly translated, with my apologies to Spanish speaking people, 'In the blacksmith's house they eat with wooden spoons'.

In reference to the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy (talk about another week of hell), I was reading about street protests and the famous May 1968 protests in France. One of the tactics used by Parisians was to make the powers that be look ridiculous or absurd. In reflecting on this, I think that it is apparent that Microsoft is deserving of ridicule. I think it's ridiculous that Microsoft implores the world to trust the management of billions of dollars/Euros - pick the currency that you like - in e-commerce to their products. They do this at the same time that they themselves attempt to ridicule open source. This is funny because anyone watching our information super-highway perform in the highest hours of the Code Red worm's virulence would have realized that the Internet still managed to chug along despite not because of the presence of Microsoft. The White House understood that when they switched their servers over to Linux. We're not safe this week either. I just /dev/null'd the 700th e-mail asking for "my advice". It's apparent that the pipes that make up the cyber-space plumbing are clogged with Microsoft hair-balls.

In all fairness, Microsoft itself is also a victim. (albeit, one who leaves all his doors unlocked and then wonders why his house got burglarized.) The root of all the evil here are the people who insist on writing these viruses. I really think these are the worst form of human being on this planet. I don't, however advocate the death penalty for them as David Coursey did in his piece on the SirCam worm which I guess was trying to be funny. It obviously takes quite a bit of talent to design, code and implement a virus like this. That talent should be used towards creating a program that attacks illiteracy, for example, not other people's computers. It also takes quite a bit of talent to raise an 'empire' on the scale that Bill Gates has done. But instead of dumping all that money into ads, they should have dumped a bit of it into discovering the countless ways people can attack their programs. Interestingly, our planet's official "richest human" just announced that they're spending over 5 billion dollars on research and development this year. They spent over 4 billion last year. What were they researching? Better ways of keeping people from seeing the Bettman Archives? Shouldn't it have been spent on keeping hackers out of their servers? I guess not.

Yes indeed, the boys and girls in Redmond need a vacation. They need to sit back and figure out what they're trying to do. Personally, as a Linux advocate, I feel that the longer the vacation they take, the better. How about permanently? I know that's not realistic, so I'd settle for the summer. If Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer or whoever is in charge there at the moment closed the Redmond campus for the summer, it might just be the breath of fresh air we need in the IT world. We'd get the Internet running at 100% again, people would start to realize that a world without Microsoft isn't such a scary place after all and virus "sharks" might just decide to lay off for a while.

Michael J. Jordan considers himself a "Linux educator". Michael started his stint in the workforce as a teacher and his mission in this world, at present, is to educate people and businesses on the benefits of using Linux. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan@Linux.org