Radsoft
 About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Home » Rants

The Rubbish That's the BBC

This is BBC 'journalism'?


Buy It

Try It

Rixstep published an excellent dissection of the latest Windows woe today.

http://rixstep.com/2/20090318,00.shtml

Called 'Windows: Give It Up, Dude', it takes the POV of a Unix user and sees how much of the typical shenanigans on Windows systems raise an eyebrow from a security standpoint.

Almost all of it does.

Unauthenticated drive by attacks are allowed to get into and modify the deep innards of the Windows system, turn off security features, read and inject code into other running processes, change startup settings, change boot settings, and so forth.

And Bill Gates wants to call his Windows an 'operating system'? And as the article asks not fully rhetorically: why hasn't Windows been banned around the globe?

Indeed. But perhaps the best is how BBC 'technology writer' Bill Thompson comes to Microsoft's rescue, something he's certainly not been adverse to doing before, and this time breaks all records for polluting those Internet tubes with unadulterated rubbish.

Of course the Joe Lusers of the world won't know any better. That's the whole point. Bloggers who try to protest won't get the mainstream traffic; the BBC will. That's why the BBC and Bill Thompson get paid those big £££ to spew out that rubbish.

Hole in the Machine

Thompson's latest piece is called Hole in the Machine and is as close to a customised made to order spin article as anyone's likely to see this year. The whole point of this shameless thing is to keep Joe Luser Windows-centric and to work on his natural instincts to question whether the ridiculous situation that is Windows security is really as good as it gets.

Of course it's not - and most readers of this article know it - but readers at the BBC won't know it. They're to be kept in the dark because Bill Gates wants it so.

'Like many other malicious programs Conficker preys on Windows', Thompson spews. 'Like many other'? Hello? What malicious programs attack any other system? This 'like many' is merely a concession to all the protests that have streamed into the BBC anyway - the BBC are notorious for covering Bill Gates' pathetic butt.

'There will always be flaws and security holes in the rich, complex computing environment, and as a result there will always be space for malicious software to propagate.'

Bullshit. Pure. Unadulterated. Bullshit. Systems far more complex, far more sophisticated, and far more intelligent than Windows will ever be have NEVER been hit like Windows, despite their being available for much longer and in advanced computing circles being even more prevalent than Windows ever will be.

Unix Runs the Internet

Unix runs the Internet; the Internet was designed and written on Unix and for Unix and today Unix servers totally dominate on the Internet; and yet you never hear of anything happening to them. But put one pathetic Redmond web server online and it's lights out, game over, just like that.

IBM mainframes; Sun's powerful servers; Ubuntu servers; FreeBSD servers running Apache Stronghold; Akamai who power Microsoft's own website and wouldn't be caught dead running Microsoft's crappy web software: the list is endless. Almost as much so as the list of malware titles hitting Microsoft products.

'Whatever happens with this particular worm, we have to hope that the security features in Windows 7 will reduce the impact of all types of malicious software in the Microsoft ecosystem.'

Yeah right. The 'Microsoft ecosystem' is a toxic infected swamp. There's nothing there to be protective of; the US Government Accountability Office condemned all things Microsoft years ago; Gartner Research chimed in and agreed.

Amit Yoran of the Department of Homeland Security condemned them; Bruce Schneier and Dan Geer condemned them; and now the Electronic Frontier Foundation are telling people to abandon them completely.

Something hard to understand here? Of course Bill Thompson won't address these points: the whole objective of his article is to skirt around them and keep Microsoft products thriving in the Best Buys of the world - that's what he's paid for.

Not Bill Gates' Fault!

Thompson now turns up the volume and cautiously points a finger at Joe Luser himself.

'But while it's easy to blame Microsoft for making its systems vulnerable we should also acknowledge that our own demands have contributed a great deal to the current situation and may make a complete solution unachievable.'

He knew it was coming. This was the danger he was commissioned to get at. Why exactly are ordinary users to be held to blame? For doing exactly what? Ordinary users get what Microsoft and other companies put on their plates. No other operating system vendor has put such inedible gunk on any user's plate. Only Microsoft. How then are users to blame?

They're not. Of course not. This is merely a tack to make Joe Luser feel bad for getting infected with 100,000+ viruses every three months whilst his friends on Unix have yet to install any antivirus software.

'Perhaps we should not be surprised that attempts to make these systems secure have failed.'

Failed attempts? Where exactly? Last anyone looked SunOS was doing fine, thank you. So were IBM's big iron systems. And Ubuntu. And all the systems from the regents of the state of California. And Apple's Mac OS X. No failed attempts there to speak of. Nope! Not at any of them.

And such a meticulously couched choice of words. The 'perhaps' is 'perhaps' the best. Thompson is not going too far out on a limb; then again that's exactly what he's doing. Clever, innit?

Chewbacca Defence

And now that Bill Thompson has Joe Luser's head spinning so he's almost overcome by grief at his own criminality in demanding too much from poor Bill Gates: he clobbers Joe over the head with a Chewbacca Defence to beat all.

'I see a parallel between our attempts to have security and reliability in the complex computer systems we are building today and the attempts by philosophers at the turn of the 20th to reduce all of mathematics to formal logic.'

Reducing all mathematics to formal logic? At the turn of the 20th? Yeah that fits right in with Joe Luser's sophisticated Weltanschauung. Yeah Joe Luser will eat that right up.

The Microsoft shill then goes on to elaborate for another two paragraphs just so he's sure Chewbacca looks good in furnished rooms again. And by the end of the article and at the end of the day he rises to the rank of the biggest Microsoft whore of all time.

See Also
BBC Complaints: Make a Complaint
Rixstep Learning Curve: Windows: Give It Up, Dude!

About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Copyright © Radsoft. All rights reserved.