[SpamCop-List] Re: [media] Microsoft's Anti-Spyware Beta To Debut Thursday

[Blammo]

On 05 Jan 2005 Fred K entered spamcop and left
news:crhtjt$l8q$1 at news.spamcop.net: 

> 
> "Paul Johnson" <baloo at ursine.dyndns.org> wrote in message 
> news:1104967821.532061 at ursine.dyndns.org...
>> But the question begs to be asked:  Why doesn't Microsoft just fix
>> the bugs
>> that make it's platform such a popular spyware target to begin with?
> 
> Because from my career as a professional software fixer I have learned
> that any large complex software application is NEVER finished. When it
> is retired legacy software it will still have bugs. Just the nature of
> a very complicated beast.
> 

I can accept that to some extent, however it doesn't excuse stupid things 
like being able to rename an .exe to a .scr and yet Windows still sees it 
as an .exe (similar with .bat, lnk, .xls etc.)
It's mostly the stupid things that viruses and spyware try to take 
advantage of (like extensions being hidden so that users think an exe is an 
image). Or any time an install of a program tells you you must reboot, 
that's a good sign it's going to hide some process in the background, or 
make some important change to the system. Or when it makes some change and 
doesn't tell you (as with a virus) Windows gives you no warning, other 
than the meaningless message at bootup.
The warning flags should have went up when we had to disable the bios virus 
protection in order to run Windows.

-- 
| Ric
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