] From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
] ...
] You could have senders sign any executables. That might help a little,
] > as long as the sender's machine hasn't been compromised.
]
] this would also help, but we'd need a better way to verify the sender's
] signature than we have now.
It wouldn't help much, unless you are of the religion that believes
authentication implies authorization. Or don't you think that
today's evil doer could have managed to get the latest virus signed
with some company's key? My bet is that many among those websites
that are defaced have handy dandy files of ASCII encoded binary
around near the anonymously improved HTML.
.......
From: John Stracke <francis(_at_)ecal(_dot_)com>
Then again, it doesn't say DON'T CUT YOUR CUSTOMER'S ARM OFF either.
Don't be silly; a vendor would never cut a customer's arm off. How would
they pull out their wallet to pay for the next upgrade?
Don't you be silly either; vendors that think that shipping browsers
with ActiveX turned on from most of the Internet don't want or expect
customers to do anything so "un-user-friendly" as explicitly authorizing
payment. They're happy to infer lack of serous protest as authorization
to debit credit card accounts. They also value the freedom to innovate
missing arms to reduce protests that are not really serious.
(I'd hate to be the marketoon who coined "freedom to innovate." It's
already enshrined as one of the all time Newspeak phrases denoting its
opposite...oh, well, that's probably a badge of honor in some circles.)
.......
From: Lillian Komlossy <Lillian(_at_)dmnews(_dot_)com>
Let's not make it political. We've all been attacked, it is pointless
to bring in the Unix vs Windows debate. Office, Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac
are all great as long as somebody likes to work with them.
I personally like Microsoft products, but I respect those who don't - and
expect the same respect from them.
You don't get respect for buying what everyone else buys, and you get the
opposite when you buy and use the infamously worst available. (Never mind
that one can't be anything except "political" when demanding "respect.")
At this late date anyone admitting using Outlook without coercion is asking
for contempt from anyone whose respect is worth having. The technical
reasons for that are infamous and too numerous to list here.
.......
} If MS gets split, we could have Office for UNIX sooner rather than
} later too!
There are already packages similar to Office available for many free and
commercial flavors of UNIX. At least one major contender even comes with
something supposedly vaguely like free source. Note that I'm not
recommending those alternatives. Office is fine for simple documents such
as your resume, provided you take precautions with tools outside Office
to ensure that you're not distributing more text, macros, and other stuff
than meets the eye of the casual reader.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com