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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Nothing succeeds like excess...
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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The recent deluge of worms and viruses, including Tuesday's bombardment by the latest variant of the Sobig virus, may be a result of last week's Blaster worm tweaking adolescent egos, according to security experts. The same experts also slammed Microsoft and end users for the parts each played in the latest dramas.
Blaster's "success" probably encouraged other malicious coders to devote the weekend to working on their own evil little creations, said Chris Belthoff, senior security analyst antivirus firm Sophos
That explains why the network experience is starting to suck for an awful lot of us - it probably explains the numerous small outages I'm seeing with my cable service. I had a tech out yesterday, and he found that my signal strength was just fine - and had no good explanation for why I'm getting periodic disconnections. Whatever the problem is, it's further up the lines - possibly Comcast's network getting hit with the email being sent by all the worms out there... who knows.
Related to all this is an interesting editorial in ComputerWorld this week, where their editor quotes a university's IT coordinator
Among the many IT professionals watching this wormy nightmare unfold was Carl Ness, distributed information systems coordinator at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. He e-mailed me with a straightforward but difficult question: Why?
"Why aren't people, especially at the chief executive level, asking: 'Why are we still using this stuff?' " Ness wanted to know. "If these problems were at this level for any other operating system, executives would have demanded that it be ripped out and replaced."
A longtime Novell and Unix user, Ness has 33 servers in production at the 1,200-student college, and only half a dozen of those run Windows. Yet he finds it maddening that disruptions like the Blaster worm are becoming business as usual. "We should not accept the phrase, 'Well, it's Microsoft, we just have to put up with it,' " Ness said, contending that IT pros need to push their managers harder to consider alternatives to Microsoft. Where is the tipping point for your company? How much more business disruption can you sustain?
Very good questions. If a home appliance worked this badly, would you buy that brand again? What about a car? So why are we so complacent about Windows? Heck, if the open source Linux seems scary, take Infoworld's advice and take a serious look at the new Macs - Unix based, rock solid - and easy to use and administer. IMHO, it's time for users to take IT to task for this crap.
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