Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/128385;_ylt=AnYSp3TwbF_W2YFkgjhv9oEDW7oF
>
> Prior to this controversial story there was some creep (under question) who
> blamed a hijacker for stuff that was found on his hard-drive. When 1 in 4
> Windows PCs is under total control of a hacker (vint Cerf coughed out some
> figures), nothing can be assumed. It's like one big 'PC orgy' where to
> contents of one's computer are meaningless. In fact, a guilty person can
> plant some malware in his/her PC immediately after getting caught... you
> know, to feed the defence. In china, 75% (or was it 90%) of the computers
> are/were said to have malware.
>
Don't ignore the fact that unix machines are not exactly 100% proof
against intrusion, too; I appreciate that they're over 100,000 times
less likely to suffer from malware, but even five orders of magnitude
better does not make something completely secure. Consider how many
people use nfs, say, and wireless lans with WEP encryption. These are
easily crackable by anyone with a reasonable level of skill, and an
intrusion could well take place without you even knowing that it has
happened. Further, if someone wanted to store information or data which
was illegal in their normal jurisdiction, why wouldn't they store it on
a machine they've found their way into?
I tend to side with Peter J here, that if we accept such a degree of
intrusion into our lives generally, we will find ourselves in a police
state in short order. Imagine how much monitoring might have gone on in
the Soviet countries had Windows been ubiquitous at that time?
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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