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Re: [Asrg] Re: Usefulness of wholesale blocking of attachments for SMTP? (Lane Sharman et al)

2004-04-20 04:57:21
No Not "a negligent abuse-enabler"

Simply a user of Microsoft windows

What's the difference?

That's rather flip, but I'm basically serious: except for a very few
people who are good enough to lock down their Windows - so few as to be
statistically ignorable - I see the second set as a subset of the
first.  Running software from a company with a long history of
producing grossly insecure software, in a security-critical function
(like the operating system!), on a known-hostile net, _is_ being a
negligent abuse-enabler.

But don't be fooled if M$ fixes their game, nix derivatives will fall
foul of such problems.

Less so, I believe.  It is significantly harder, if onjly because the
Unix world is much less monocultural.

spammers and hackers always take the path of least resistance which
is currently windows.

Spammers generally do, yes.  Hackers often don't; it's fairly common
for a hacker faced with an uninteresting problem to generalize it
enough to make it interesting, solve the new (and significantly harder)
problem, and thereby solve the original problem as a special case.
This is hardly the path of least resistance.  Also, many hackers have a
rather compelling sense of aesthetics, and want a solution that they
consider aesthetic, even if it is a good deal more work.  For example,
this is why I'm writing my own ssh implementation.  (This aspect of the
hacker personality may be somewhat off-topic, though, as its only
relevance to spam I can see involves building anti-spam software.)

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