Oh, my Word!!

[lordshipmayhem]

And there's yet another zero-day exploit for Redmond's Superior System.

This time, they're using e-mails with Word attachments (.doc file extension).

Is there a patch for it? As more than one Slashdot wag has put it, yes, here.

Aside from gaming (sandwichboy, I said ASIDE FROM GAMING), why do people insist on sticking to MS's offerings? I've been getting spammed right now at least once a day, each from a different computer, with someone's stock adverts attached to a message carefully disguised as a bunch of nonsense words strung together to almost make some sort of demented sense. They look like they're coming from zombie computers, because one will be plain text including the attempted attachment, the next will be some sort of Rich Text and include the stock advert as an attachment, one today arrived as an HTML document, which Kontact renders in the original code. (To see the mass of code as a webpage and risk infestation of your own computer "Click here if you trust the recipient", which I fscking well do not. DELETE!!) And I'll bet every one of those zombies are running some version or other of Microsoft Windows, and their owners do not even know their computers are p0wned.

Comments

[shivanesti.livejournal.com]

While I advocate switching to Linux for the home (even though I haven't done so yet) because most of the applications that home users run have viable Linux counterparts, it is *much* much harder to have businesses switch.

For the home:
The biggest issue for many is that nearly all of the PC games are not ported to Linux -- they are Windows only. This can be surmounted by booting into a Windows partition for gaming while using a Linux partition for everything else, but often people will use IM, listen to music, check email and web browse while playing a game. That's the majority of activity that home users do on their computers. If they do these things while gaming then it may not be worthwhile for them to give up that up while gaming and do it only while booted into Linux. If they're lucky they have another non-game computer where they can do these things, but that's unlikely for most. The real answer is for game developers to port their games to Linux at release or shortly thereafter. Gaming often drives computer technology and increased usage of computers. Developers could cause a paradigm shift in the industry if they developed their games for Linux instead of Windows exclusively.

For the business:
Depending on what vertical industry you're working in, Linux and open-source or paid software can be a viable alternative, or it could be nearly impossible. The improbability or impossibility occurs primarily due to business application availability and vendor support. Most business applications are again developed for Windows. I'm talking about Adobe Photoshop, MS Office, Dreamweaver, and Quicken because they each have open-source duplicates. I'm talking about the business applications like payroll, accounting, financial tracking, customer relationship management, document management, etc that all integrate with each other on a Windows platform. All the middleware that links them together. All these things also come with vendor support.

Now don't get me wrong, depending on which vertical market you're in, there are apps that run on Unix which can be easily ported to Linux, but you don't usually see the same level of integration between these apps and various others. This is because these apps are more specialized. I think that might be changing a bit, but slowly.

So it comes down to companies developing their products for Linux across the board. When that happens then businesses will not be shackled to Microsoft's hegemony.

[lordshipmayhem.livejournal.com]

Actually, for the business Linux can actually be more painless than the home user, it depends on the business's size and the software being used.

Firms that are both older and larger are more likely to be using Unix on their server rooms - their support staff are already well on the way to being fully-trained in Linux, and many of their custom applications are easily ported to the Linux environment. Also, they're likely to be using ERP software - Oracle and SAP have a 50/50 split of the bulk of this market, with Oracle pushing hard for their customers to switch to Linux.

Home users and SMB's are going to have more problems, because they need someone to hold their hand during their conversion process. Fortunately with new Live CD distributions like Knoppix and Puppy, you can try it out and learn how it works before committing yourself.

When I converted, Mandriva (Mandrake back then) said, "Oh, you have Windows on your computer, would you like to dual-boot?" Thank YOU, yes. So I ended up with the best of both worlds, Linux for the Internet and Windows for what wasn't available just yet on Linux. Right now, that's tax preparation software.