| Tuesday, August 26, 2003 |
00:45 - Oh my, a flaming paper bag on my doorstep
|
(top)  |
Well, I'm back. And joy of joys, I see there's a little present that's been left for me in my inbox.
Well, no-- perhaps little is the misnomer of the year.
It's this new "SoBig" virus that I heard whispers of while up in Toronto, see. The worst Outlook virus ever, so I'm told. Klez-like in its behavior (in that it combs through your cached Web history and e-mail boxes as well as your address book for names and addresses, which it uses to forge both the recipient and the sender, the upshot of which being that anybody who has a popular website with their e-mail address on it will get bombarded with a copy of the worm for every infected person who's ever been to their site, as well as angry messages directly sent from people who think I've been sending them these things), but not in its impact (where Klez had internal brakes to prevent it from propagating exponentially, SoBig does not-- it can send multiple copies of itself simultaneously, for example). The worm's payload is 103K when encoded. It exploits a vulnerability in Outlook that's been patched for months. A patch that nobody on Earth has apparently applied.
Care to guess how many copies of this charming little beastie were to be found in my inbox upon my landing just before midnight tonight? All starting sometime during the evening of August 18, one day after I left on my vacation which I knew in the back of my brain that I'd regret having taken? Go on. Guess how many.
No. Higher.
Higher.
I'm not kidding. More digits.
Give up?
21,000.
Twenty-one thousand. For a combined mailbox size of 1.14 gigabytes.
Boy oh boy, am I going to have fun getting this one under control. Ten new copies every time I check for new messages. Oh, sure, I'll filter it out on the server side (somehow). But first things first. I've got to try to download all this crap, then sort it and delete the garbage. Then I'll have to tackle the /var/mail directory on the server and see just how bursting it is. That's all I need-- the server itself to burst its seams over this.
Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you so fucking much. This is just what I wanted to spend my first night back home doing.
You know, I'm going to have to regress a little bit here. For the longest time my feelings toward Microsoft were downright murderous. Then, for the past couple of years, they were mostly just sort of tiredly amused. You know, the old whaddyagonnado? thing. But that's not going to survive this little episode. I can't hold myself back. There's going to have to be some payback, and somehow I don't think I'm the only one who will have been hit in a similar manner or driven to such a pass.
I mean, it's really become self-parody in its purest form, hasn't it? Microsoft announces with great fanfare that it is reorganizing its software development strategies so as to put security above all other concerns. And what follows in the subsequent twelve months but a litany of unprecedented viruses, worms, compromise vulnerabilities, and other hideous failures that would be an irreparable embarrassment to any other company-- that would make such a company into a laughingstock that would thrust the Enron scandal firmly into the sweatband of a cocked hat, in a train-wreck of a performance of a piece of software that I can't turn my back on for ten lousy days without it abruptly mutating and exploding and sending radioactive tentacles everywhere, like some homeless guy from an alley in Toronto who shrieks at the top of his lungs continuously and with no apparent flagging of energy, and who decides inexplicably to follow you four blocks to the subway station, still emitting howls of wordless fury after your retreating back, yet somehow able to buy subway tokens and operate the turnstiles because you hear him screeching furiously in your direction as soon as the subway door opens for each the next five stops up the Downsview-University-Spadina line?
I've had it. I've had it up to here with Microsoft's incompetence, their lip-service to making things better, and their insufferably arrogant attitude towards the consumer. Enough is enough. Too much is riding on the Internet now for companies who pit their fortunes on it not to notice this massive liability they have in trusting the construction of the scaffolding on which they climb to Microsoft. There will have to be a reckoning, because nobody can ignore the irony of a solemn vow of commitment to security and reliability being followed by a year of escalating security breaches of never-before-seen proportions.
Now, don't nobody be giving me no platitudes about how if it weren't Outlook out there serving people's e-mail needs, it would be some other program-- Eudora or Netscape (pbuh) or Pegasus Mail or whatever-- which would invariably be equally as bad as Microsoft's piece of compiled compost, and even worse for business because what purchasing manager would trust his company's fortunes to a firm he can't sue for the sum of his company's market cap? Please. It's been well documented for many years (right here on this page, I might add) that Microsoft's software is garbaceous in ways that other companies with far fewer resources just can't even approach no matter how hard they try. It's like trying to dance against the beat: most companies can't force themselves to produce crap that smells as bad as Microsoft's. It's not possible. Most companies employ human beings with standards of personal pride in what they write. How can such beings compete with the million monkeys hammering away in the lava caves under Mt. Rainier?
Maybe SoBig will fade away to a smirk and a roll of the eyes from the Buddy-Holly-looking guy on the evening news at eight minutes to the hour, just like every other past snafu that whirls in a maelstrom through the Internet every few months with Microsft serene and calm and unruffled at the center. Maybe nothing will come of this, just like always. We'll all just sigh, roll up our sleeves, and pick up the old shit-shovels like we do every time, dutifully spooning Microsoft's clockwork turds into baggies and stirring them into our ice cream to eat with a smile. I can't freaking wait.
I'm thinking maybe we need to start an action group: CUHMLHFWS, or Citizens United to Help Microsoft Learn How to Fucking Write Software. It would be a great philanthropic undertaking, surely one from which the world would benefit.
If anybody needs me, I'll bee knee-deep in twenty-one thousand gallons of solid waste.
|
|
