On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:55:25 +0100, Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:
I'd even go so far as to say we're going to continue to have massive
amounts of spam as long as Windows is the dominant PC operating system.
I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous. The only link between Windows and
spam is that lots of people have Windows, and it's relatively easy to use,
so lots of spammers use it.
Well, Windows does have a well-deserved reputation for being easy to
break into, and a lot of spam these days comes from compromised Windows
hosts. Much of this reputation results from deliberate decisions on the
part of MS to violate the MIME specifications - in particular, to allow
the sender of a message to effectively be able to specify what
application will be used to run a message (by specifying the filename
extension) and to allow untrustworthy content to be presented (by
running that application) rather than simply offering to save the
content to a file. Maybe they've fixed this by now. I wouldn't know
because I stopped using Windows several years ago.
In addition, Windows has some fairly deep assumptions about what a
program ought to be able to do with (to?) a computer that make it less
secure than other OSes. So yes, IMHO there are limitations to the
security of Windows that are not shared by all other OSes, and the only
way to fix that problem is for Windows to drastically break
compatibility with previous versions of Windows.
So while there might be a bit of exaggeration to my statement, in the
sense that it's possible to make an OS that's called "Windows" that is
as secure as any other OS (as long as you don't care to make it terribly
backward compatible), I think it's as correct as any one-sentence
generalization about spam can be.
Keith