Re: Linux is as buggy as Windows

From: jayjwa (jayjwa_at_hotspam.microsoftsux.suk)
Date: 10/13/03

  • Next message: Volker Birk: "Re: Linux is as buggy as Windows" 
    Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:16:02 +0000

    Leythos wrote:
    > In article <vo9hqpoe8duef2@corp.supernews.com>,
    > jayjwa@hotspam.microsoftsux.suk says...
    >
    >>david20@alpha2.mdx.ac.uk wrote:
    >>
    >>
    >>>David Webb
    >>>VMS and Unix team leader
    >>
    >> ^^^^^
    >> Biting the hand that feeds you???
    >
    >
    > That's almost funny - a chap that has experience in both OS's and others
    > gives his opinion and you attack him too.
    >
    > David, being a person experienced in both worlds actually had a lot of
    > interesting things to say - where actual points were made.
    >
    > On the other hand, had YOU been able to discuss this topic without
    > attacking people and being open to understanding some things about both
    > platforms people would have taken you more seriously - as it is I think
    > most people that have real world experience both platforms just assume
    > you are one of the Linux bigots that really doesn't want to understand
    > anything.

    The reason I can speak as I do is because I have been there, done that,
    got a tee-shirt or two. When people make incorrect assumptions and state
    their options _as hard facts_, then yes, they will get "attacked", as
    you like to call it. I have more that stated my reasons, both here and
    elsewhere, in other usenet postings, about the reasons I can't stand
    Windows.

    50% of it stems for being technically inferior
    50% for the way MS markets Windows, AND treats their customers, and as
    such generates most of my hatered for them. You wouldn't dispise a
    company that got rich off of bullying the competion, buying out anything
      it saw as a threat, or bring lawsuit against anything else that was
    left standing? You ever call MS for tech. support? Any idea what you'll
    get? Honestly, I can't tell if its a human, or a robot, it's really that
    bad. Either way, don't follow what they say, because chances are they
    are more clueless than you are about the issue- they were in my case,
    and caused about a week's worth of downtime. They make half-assed,
    hacked-together code, (evident by the amount of "patches" they later
    have to issue) that they actually _have the balls_ to make YOU pay for!!
    When much, much better OS's exist! Not just Linux, so don't think I'm
    all Linux crazy- look at the BSD's, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, then
    there's less-known ones that are basically beefed up clones of DOS, and
    of course 10 million kinds of Linux, for all people, from beginner
    friendly stuff like RH & Mandrake, to server-inclined Slackware. So yes,
    I get upset when I see people standing behind Micr$oft & Windows- they
    don't stand behind you. Did you get a free copy? I don't think so! Fork
      over that $200 for a basic desktop system that can't do what a $0
    Linux or BSD system can. And yet people continue to support it. Just try
    calling MS Tech, after you've spent your hard-earned money on their
    junk- guess what you will mostlikely get: a Newsgroup, where people just
    as lost as you are will be asking the same questions- this is where I
    was directed, after emailing about a IE upgrade that completely fucked
    my system. I can't get online most times, and they say go to this
    Newsgroup! But that was awhile ago, I since dumped any and all MS crap.

    Know this about MS??
    >
    >
    > This news article was copied verbatium from Geek.com at http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/gee20030226018826.htm
    >
    > and details what I've already suspected and stated countless times before- that Micro$oft is playing BigBrother at its Windows Update Sites.
    >
    > posted 9:43am EST Wed Feb 26 2003 - submitted by J. Eric Smith
    >
    > NEWS
    >
    > The difficulty of keeping up with the endless flow of patches and fixes coming from Microsoft has long been a reason for the poor security administration worldwide of its products. To address this concern, Microsoft rolled out its Windows Update service several years ago to much fanfare. Finally, ordinary users could go to a single Web page and it would download all the patches and install them automatically. What could be better?
    >
    > Privacy advocates took issue, though, with the possibility for sensitive data to be passed to Microsoft during the update procedure. Microsoft's verbage on the update site indicates that no personal data is being sent to Microsoft, but German researchers at tecChannel were a bit perplexed at the amount of data flowing not into your computer from Microsoft, but out of it to Microsoft. So, they analyzed the packets to see what was going on.
    >
    > As it turns out, packet analysis is useless, as the stream is encrypted via Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). However, using an undocumented Windows feature, tecChannel was able to get around this and view the raw data. The results were alarming. Embedded in the data stream were lists of what software you have installed on your PC--and not just Microsoft products. Apparently the folks in Redmond can find out just what you've got installed on your PC, all without you ever knowing about it or explicitly consenting to it.
    >
    > You can head over to tecChanel.de for the full story (subscription required).

    Oh, wait, it gets MUCH better!!

    Full article: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html

    For people that don't follow links (I'd hate for you to miss this one!):

    > The TCG project is known by a number of names. `Trusted computing' was the original one, and is still used by IBM, while Microsoft calls it `trustworthy computing' and the Free Software Foundation calls it `treacherous computing'. Hereafter I'll just call it TC, which you can pronounce according to taste. Other names you may see include TCPA (TCG's name before it incorporated), Palladium (the old Microsoft name for the version due to ship in 2004) and NGSCB (the new Microsoft name). Intel has just started calling it `safer computing'. Many observers believe that this confusion is deliberate - the promoters want to deflect attention from what TC actually does.
    >
    > 2. What does TC do, in ordinary English?
    >
    > TC provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
    >
    > TC will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. In the first version of TC, pirate software could be detected and deleted remotely. Since then, Microsoft has sometimes denied that it intended TC to do this, but at WEIS 2003 a senior Microsoft manager refused to deny that fighting piracy was a goal: `Helping people to run stolen software just isn't our aim in life', he said. The mechanisms now proposed are more subtle, though. TC will protect application software registration mechanisms, so that unlicensed software will be locked out of the new ecology. Furthermore, TC apps will work better with other TC apps, so people will get less value from old non-TC apps (including pirate apps). Also, some TC apps may reject data from old apps whose serial numbers have been blacklisted. If Microsoft believes that your copy of Office is a pirate copy, and your local government moves to TC, then the documents you file with them may be unreadable. TC will also make it
     easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades to Media Player, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.
    >
    > For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: TC looks like being the answer to his prayer.
    >
    > There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.
    >
    > There are some gotchas too. For example, TC can support remote censorship. In its simplest form, applications may be designed to delete pirated music under remote control. For example, if a protected song is extracted from a hacked TC platform and made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player software may detect it using a watermark, report it, and be instructed remotely to delete it (as well as all other material that came through that platform). This business model, called traitor tracing, has been researched extensively by Microsoft (and others). In general, digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators, rather than under the control of the person who owns the machine on which they happen to be stored (as at present). So someone who writes a paper that a court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to do the deletion if s
    he refuses. Given such possibilities, we can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders.
    >
    > The gotcha for businesses is that your software suppliers can make it much harder for you to switch to their competitors' products. At a simple level, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor. Such blatant lock-in might be prohibited by the competition authorities, but there are subtler lock-in strategies that are much harder to regulate. (I'll explain some of them below.)
    >
    > 3. So I won't be able to play MP3s on my computer any more?
    >
    > With existing MP3s, you may be all right for some time. Microsoft says that TC won't make anything suddenly stop working. But a recent software update for Windows Media Player has caused controversy by insisting that users agree to future anti-piracy measures, which may include measures that delete pirated content found on your computer. Also, some programs that give people more control over their PCs, such as VMware and Total Recorder, are not going to work properly under TC. So you may have to use a different player - and if your player will play pirate MP3s, then it may not be authorised to play the new, protected, titles.
    >
    > It is up to an application to set the security policy for its files, using an online policy server. So Media Player will determine what sort of conditions get attached to protected titles. I expect Microsoft will do all sorts of deals with the content providers, who will experiment with all sorts of business models. You might get CDs that are a third of the price but which you can only play three times; if you pay the other two-thirds, you'd get full rights. You might be allowed to lend your copy of some digital music to a friend, but then your own backup copy won't be playable until your friend gives you the main copy back. More likely, you'll not be able to lend music at all. Creeping digital lockdown will make life inconvenient in many niggling ways; for example, regional coding might stop you watching the Polish version of a movie if your PC was bought outside Europe.
    >
    > This could all be done today - Microsoft would just have to download a patch into your player - but once TC makes it hard for people to tamper with the player software, and easy for Microsoft and the music industry to control what players will work at all with new releases, it will be harder for you to escape.

    (Sorry about the formating)
    You still want to give MS your money??

    http://www.freeos.org
      Maybe you didn't know that you can get better than Windows, for free?
    With a large development base where people are always making new and
    improved software? People that depend on their coding skills to get
    products recognised, not on a name. Did you know Linux can read Windows
    disks/files, and, in many cases, run it's programs? It can even write
    data in a Windows-readable formate. Dump MS and it's over-priced,
    worm-laden, virus-infested, alpha-versioned crap. Most all free
    operating systems come with everything you need/want: compilers,
    databases, spread-sheets, games, webservers, ftp servers, secure-shell
    servers, and other daemons too, older ones like telnet servers, RPC's
    ident servers; client programs for all the servers; word processors,
    many different editors both graphics and text-based, serveral different
    web browsers: Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, Opera, Lynx, Links,
    programming languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, C/C++, shell scripts &
    CGI's, java, Fortran, Eiffle, and serveral different assemblers, MySQL,
    X Windows & all it's graphical clients, full OS utilities &
    administrative tools, debuggers, + full documentation for all of it, in
    serveral forms. And what isn't included is most likely written by
    someone, ready to be downloaded and installed- free. What does Windows
    come with, for all the money you pay for it?? There are many OS's,
    better than MS's, for free, ready to download & install right now:

    http://www.openbsd.org/
    http://www.freebyte.com/operatingsystems/ Many different ones
    http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html Has a neat little search function
    to find a distrobution to your specification.
    http://www.cotse.com/miniunix.htm - I got my first mini-copy of a Linux
    system here, called Brutalware Linux, which was based on Slackware. To
    my surprise, it detected _all_ of my hardware, without trouble-
    something Windows itself couldn't do. About 1 week later I went to
    http:/www.slackware.com , found a mirror site at
    http://www.slackware.at/data/ and downloaded Slackware 9.0 in it's entirety.

    Even with a slow line, like a 56k modem, you can still have a full OS
    down in about 3 days, maybe 1 if it's just the basic parts & you add to
    it later. Or just buy one someone made for about 10 bucks, the cost of
    labor to make it and S&H.
    So... if all this exists, and its better, much cheaper (or free), has
    everything one could ask for already included, is much less vulerable to
      worms or virus, and, in many cases, run Windows apps anyway, for God's
    sake- why does anyone still support MS, knowing what it's done in the
    past and (reading the above articles) what it wants to do in the
    future???!!!! 

    -- 
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