ODAY I was reminded why, despite the fact that I never set my hands on Windows machines, they still manage to hinder my work. I was ready to upload experimental data to personal Webspace, in order to have it transferred to a colleague down in London. I was then faced with a hot red warning message saying that the large ZIP archive appeared to be a virus (merely based on file size and file type). Renaming the data file and changing its filetype would not help. I was forced to send to the entire lump of data (4 GB, yet compress) to a different computer and then FTP it, which is a really time-consuming PITA.

Why was I presented with a prompt saying that the file may be a virus in the first place? Allow me to generalise this question. Why is it that there are terms such as “trusted sites” or “dangerous, malicious E-mail”? Yes, Windows is still severely flawed. Windows is insecure by design and this has led society to take system crashes for granted and assume computer security to be a top-priority risk factor (not accidental data loss or physical, hardware dysfunction). Since everyone is assumed to be using Windows, everyone suffers.

Another impact on Windows of my life are the endless heaps of SPAM. A Symantec study has shown that 80% of all spam, which is the majority of the entire world’s E-mail traffic/volume, is being despatched from Windows zombies, i.e. Windows computers that are compromised, hijacked and controlled remotely, passively sending mail, requesting files, and scanning port. To add to this pain, I was on several occasions the victim of DDOS attacks. That broken Windows was virtually, if not practically, attacking my Web sites en masse, which I think is unacceptable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under Rant, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.