[CS-FSLUG] IE6 in todays market place

[davidm at hisfeet.net]

You just made me smile!
"...governments and other crooks ...."
(cynicism=0)
Not because I disagree.


> On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
>
>> The other issue is that pirated MS software can't be updated. Is that
>> perhaps the reason so many Chinese users are on IE6? This is one
>> reason why I discourage people, especially our missionaries, from
>> buying software from the cart down the street. From what I understand
>> in Brazil it is expected that your software is pirated and this
>> actually makes it harder to share open source software. The initial
>> hook of "free" doesn't mean much.
>
> (cynicism=1)
>
> It's probably part of the picture. I can go right now to a friend and
> get pirated copies of any MS OS for nothing. These work by simply
> installing a valid-but-rescinded Volume License, removing WGA and
> declining to update it. Otherwise, they update same as any legitimate
> copy. To all appearances, the cracked ISOs are clean, including the
> bundled scripts for inserting the bogus license. I am told the ISOs were
> available in a select few languages. "Win7 Ultimate, anyone? Would you
> prefer 32-bit or 64?" As I understand it, Chinese is excluded from that
> list, so the Chinese ISOs probably come through an entirely different
> set of crackers with less "noble" motives.
>
> Of course, I agree there are probably a lot more of those older systems
> which can only run older OSes for which IE 6 was the last update.
>
> OTOH, plenty of commentators suggest MS is not really serious about
> stamping out piracy, for much the same reason federal criminal
> prosecution of major crime never touches the banks who make the crime
> possible. That is, if most of the world uses your stuff, it retains
> its value, whether it be Windows or dollars.
>
> So while I would not be worried about any real dangers from using these
> pirated copies in terms of viruses, I am very much worried about the
> vast security risks of using Windows even at its best. If you like it,
> fine, I'll try to help you make it work. But I don't like sacrificing
> that much control to some software Borg which hasn't shown much
> kindness, nor all the other agencies capable of cracking every version
> of Windows at will. I won't say MS is in bed with these others, both
> government and private, but I'm sure the list of unreported and
> unpatched vulnerabilities noted in the HBGary fiasco represents the
> difference between those who tend to report those when they are found,
> and a rather large number who do not report them. And they never seem to
> run out of new holes.
>
> I don't fear the snooping. I'm wide open. Rather, it's the same reason I
> urge my clients to let me secure their computers and routers with a
> strong password, or even by moving to Linux. There are enough risks
> without being promiscuous to abuse. If they *must* run Windows, at
> least be as secure as you reasonably can handle, with all the good
> protective software. I also urge them to learn more about compsec
> procedures and risks. All it takes is one roving crook with a netbook
> tapping someone's unsecured wifi to ruin innocent lives; it happens far
> more often than is reported. Just so, Windows machines are too easily
> turned into bots. (I know, preaching to the choir here.)
>
> I'm not sure I can utterly reject the theory governments and other
> crooks really do prefer to keep people using Windows as much as
> possible.
>
> (cynicism=0)
>
> And then there is the moral question of whether software piracy is a
> sin...
>
> Ed Hurst
> --------
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>
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