Privateer 3 Online?

Originally posted by Ghost
wow
What is your problem with XP, is the best Windows.

Where to start? I'll give 5 things that bother me most:

For one Win XP is spyware. All along. You knew that each time you do a search on your HD you PC connects to the web? You know that mediaplayer sends your playlist out as well?
Experienced users can overcome this, but the whole mass of people cannot.

XP is a non stable environment. Updates get autodownloaded into your system without your knowledge. Now while this might sound neat at first (security patches are done auto) it poses several problems. To name two:
* You system ran fine. the new service pack screws it up to a BSOD on booting. What you got to do? Even a reinstall might not solve it as the patch comes again.
* You get things installed you don't want. Like DRM. All of a sudden all you MP3 or DVDs migth stop to work because of a deal between MS and the MPAA/RIAA (look at media player 9, it is already in there to a small degree).
Experienced users can overcome this, but the whole mass of people cannot.

General design. Win XP is taking a good (well as far as you can label anything from Microsoft good) NT kernel (NT had a security rating of B2 or something like that - XP is way below) and removes security all along in order to get games playing, which at least makes it a bad design strategy.

Giant bugs like Universal PnP that open your system to about every skript kiddie in the world.

No DOS Support.

Now if I might ask the other way around: Why is XP the best Windows. Name one thing that goes for it.
 
Originally posted by cff
Where to start? I'll give 5 things that bother me most:

For one Win XP is spyware. All along. You knew that each time you do a search on your HD you PC connects to the web? You know that mediaplayer sends your playlist out as well?
Experienced users can overcome this, but the whole mass of people cannot.

XP is a non stable environment. Updates get autodownloaded into your system without your knowledge. Now while this might sound neat at first (security patches are done auto) it poses several problems. To name two:
* You system ran fine. the new service pack screws it up to a BSOD on booting. What you got to do? Even a reinstall might not solve it as the patch comes again.
* You get things installed you don't want. Like DRM. All of a sudden all you MP3 or DVDs migth stop to work because of a deal between MS and the MPAA/RIAA (look at media player 9, it is already in there to a small degree).
Experienced users can overcome this, but the whole mass of people cannot.

General design. Win XP is taking a good (well as far as you can label anything from Microsoft good) NT kernel (NT had a security rating of B2 or something like that - XP is way below) and removes security all along in order to get games playing, which at least makes it a bad design strategy.

Giant bugs like Universal PnP that open your system to about every skript kiddie in the world.

No DOS Support.

Now if I might ask the other way around: Why is XP the best Windows. Name one thing that goes for it.

Other Windows also autoupdate, and also appears the small icon in the tray bar
Never had any problem with the music, every CD or mp3 that i downloaded, can hear it without problems.

No DOS support, well, make a boot disk (And it has that window that *emulate* DOS in a weird way)

It has great stability, rarely crash in my machine, bye bye bluse screen of death (at least to me)
 
Originally posted by cff
Updates get autodownloaded into your system without your knowledge.

Disabling that feature is as simple as un-checking an option box. It's not like you have to hack the registry or anything. If most people, as you say, can't be bothered to do a little research on the product that they've chosen to use as their operating system, then I don't believe that the problem lies with the software...

No DOS Support.

Well, we can't tolerate that. After all, no modern program can possibly run without DOS support.
 
XP Problems

Well said CFF.
the more you work with computers, the more you deal with security issues, and the broader your knowledge of plugin and accessory problems becomes, the less you'll like XP.
Case in point. CFF mentioned the autoupdate issue. The company I work for sells graphic design software that requires a parallel port security key. This is common in business software, but something the average consumer has no awareness of. When XP came out, Microsoft "forgot" to install drivers for about 400 commonly used accessories such as these security keys or "hasp" drivers. Suddenly our tech support staff was overrun with people who had upgraded to XP and couldn't use their software becuse XP won't recognize the hasp.

We got a hasp driver, installed it on our website and guided dozens of users through the installation of a basic app that was supposed to be there already.

Then Microsoft released the first XP service pack and guess what? All those manually installed hasp drivers are suddenly uninstalled and worthless!!

They're either grossly incompetent or just don't give a sh$%; either way, XP sucks.


:mad:
 
XP security holes

If you really want the full story on XP's security problems, click on the "Shields Up" link below to visit Steve Gibson's website and read about the DoS attack on his site and his subsequent discussions with Microsoft programmers about internet security.

Shields Up
 
Originally posted by Ghost
Other Windows also autoupdate,

Which one?

Originally posted by Ghost

Never had any problem with the music, every CD or mp3 that i downloaded, can hear it without problems.

Never had, but soon will. DRM isn't there yet. But it is only a matter of a small amount of time. And it is the principal thing that you allow Microsoft to retract your rights to any software/file they want.

Originally posted by Ghost

It has great stability, rarely crash in my machine, bye bye bluse screen of death (at least to me)

Not that I'd name stability together with any Windows, but even in the Microsoft sector XP isn't the most stable

Originally posted by WildWeasel
Disabling that feature is as simple as un-checking an option box. It's not like you have to hack the registry or anything.

ROFLMAO. There are at least 5 or 6 boxes distributed cleverly all over the system you have to uncheck. And even then not all is off AFAIK.

Originally posted by WildWeasel

Well, we can't tolerate that. After all, no modern program can possibly run without DOS support.

Well it is a bad point, isn't it? A very bad one for me. Not so much because of gaming, but more so for system recovery. I use my Win98SE system for 3 1/2 years now and _NEVER_ reinstalled it. I keep it clean and if anything gets corrupted I repair it in DOS.
 
Well, we can't tolerate that. After all, no modern program can possibly run without DOS support.

Try deleting a folder that's been infected with a trojan and you'll wish you had DOS support. I'm having this problem at work with WIN2000 right now.
 
Originally posted by cff
Which one?

WinME.
I have two machines, one with XP and the other with ME,
and the one with ME sometimes has that icon in the tray (or task) bar that means that you are updating your machine



Originally posted by cff

Not that I'd name stability together with any Windows, but even in the Microsoft sector XP isn't the most stable

MAybe is your experience.
 
Re: XP security holes

Originally posted by DarkeningAddict
If you really want the full story on XP's security problems, click on the "Shields Up" link below to visit Steve Gibson's website and read about the DoS attack on his site and his subsequent discussions with Microsoft programmers about internet security.

Shields Up

"Shields up" is a crock though.
 
Shields up

Shields up was recommended to me by a friend who works in R&D and has contacts in the military. At the time, our businesses' network had been hacked and we were almost completely shut down by the hacker. We went to Shields up as my friend recommended, found ZoneAlarm, installed it, and shut the bastard out.

We still get the occasional e-mail virus, but nothing like before we found Shields Up.
So what's your beef with it?
 
Steve Gibson is an overdramatic, sensationalistic media whore who almost sort of knows what he's talking about.
 
Re: Shields up

Originally posted by DarkeningAddict
We went to Shields up as my friend recommended, found ZoneAlarm, installed it, and shut the bastard out.
Anyone with even vague knowledge of the matter could have told you to install ZoneAlarm or something similar.

There's probably some 7,000 comments on Slashdot that explain why "Shields up" is just a silly script.
 
Gibson is a sensationalistic clueless idiot, and ZoneAlarm isn't much better (although as a program instead of a person). He barely has a grasp on the facts of network security, but doesn't let that stop him from filling in the numerous details with wild speculation and half-assed (at best) paranoid spewing, complete with obnoxious font sizes, bold/italic font, and tons of exclamation points. That his primary target/audience is users who aren't generally "power users" only compounds the problem.

If you can access it (I can't, at the moment, because the local branch of BelSouth.net licks donkey 'nads), grcsucks.com goes into the numerous issues with Gibson and his "Chicken Little" routine.

As for ZA, like all "personal firewall" gooberware, its primary purpose is to throw up lots of scary-looking (to the uninformed) popups screaming about nearly every type of access being a "possible intrusion" or somesuch. I can't begin to count the number of fucktards who, when I was working at the AboveNet abuse desk, would sent complaints to abuse@, with ZA being the only "evidence", and even that was of standard ports like 80 (HTTP), 113 (NNTP), 23 (FTP), and so forth. The standard dismissal for those, in the ticket closing reports, was GWF, or Goober With Firewall. not infrequently the complaints from idiots about stupid stuff that ZA and its ilk complained about would outnumber legitimate concerns (network outages, cracker attacks, and so forth).
 
Originally posted by Death
As for ZA, like all "personal firewall" gooberware, its primary purpose is to throw up lots of scary-looking (to the uninformed) popups screaming about nearly every type of access being a "possible intrusion" or somesuch.
Well, as I said earlier, we were experiencing an almost complete shutdown of our business. Someone had hacked into our network and was accessing Quickbooks. We installed ZoneAlarm and the intruder was blocked. Because ZA tells you the ip address and the exact time the firewall repelled the attempt, we got to watch the hacker change strategies over the next several days trying without success to get back in.

I use it at home as well. The only time in the past year I had any trouble with viruses was shortly after I shut it down and forgot to restart it before going online. The result was an immediate trojan problem.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's not "gooberware". It's a damn good firewall.
 
"Chicken Little?"

I don't know about the other assertions regarding Gibson's hyperbole, but I don't know if I'd call him "chicken little". Do any of you guys work in an environment where you deal with webservers or handle a lot of e-mail?
I get anywhere from 20-40 emails a day and usually, at least 2 of them will contain viruses. That doesn't sound like much until you realize that those are just the ones that make it through the server's antivirus screen.

Our server is 2CoolWeb in Texas. They're extremely reliable and professional. I talked to our tech support rep about the viruses we were getting in e-mail and he said their server scans and disinfects each incoming message. They are currently disinfecting 12 to 20 thousand infected messages per hour.

It's gotten steadily worse and forced them to upgrade their servers twice in the past year.

What makes this so frustrating to me is the fact that no matter what Antivirus software we use, it either misses or fails to disinfect certain trojans. There used to be certain programs like F-PROT and F-Secure that were pretty reliable. Lately it seems that the hackers have gotten the upper hand and nothing really works.


Whether or not this is because of the dissemination of XP, as Gibson asserts is debatable, but the way I see it, the problem is very serious and getting worse.
 
Originally posted by DarkeningAddict
Well, as I said earlier, we were experiencing an almost complete shutdown of our business. Someone had hacked into our network and was accessing Quickbooks. We installed ZoneAlarm and the intruder was blocked. Because ZA tells you the ip address and the exact time the firewall repelled the attempt, we got to watch the hacker change strategies over the next several days trying without success to get back in.

I use it at home as well. The only time in the past year I had any trouble with viruses was shortly after I shut it down and forgot to restart it before going online. The result was an immediate trojan problem.

If you've got things like that happening, you've got a major security problem somewhere... Go fix it, instead of trying to patch it over with a software solution. If Zone Alarm fails, by the way you're telling things, you're screwed. One point of failure is a Bad Thing. If you're actually running a buiness on the web off this machine, get a real, hardware firewall and someone who knows how to set it up properly and fix whatever security problems you already have. A proper hardware firewall is capable of dealing with issues before they reach the hardware your important applications are running on and, as such, is more capable than any software solution on your production machine. To have trojans magically appear, your security is either wide open or you're doing things that aren't incredibly intellegent to begin with...


I don't know about the other assertions regarding Gibson's hyperbole, but I don't know if I'd call him "chicken little".

It's exactly what he's doing, though... running around exclaiming that the sky is falling, hoping that someone will come and pay attention to him.

Do any of you guys work in an environment where you deal with webservers or handle a lot of e-mail?
I get anywhere from 20-40 emails a day and usually, at least 2 of them will contain viruses. That doesn't sound like much until you realize that those are just the ones that make it through the server's antivirus screen.

Death was an abuse point of contact for a major backbone provider... he's rather more qualified than I to comment on this... Though I will add that it's hardly a problem if you don't use an insecure mail reader, and don't open things that are, in pretty much every case, obviously viruses.

They are currently disinfecting 12 to 20 thousand infected messages per hour.

It's gotten steadily worse and forced them to upgrade their servers twice in the past year.

That sounds like they're handling their mail in a really odd way... but I'll let Death, or maybe Tye take that one...

What makes this so frustrating to me is the fact that no matter what Antivirus software we use, it either misses or fails to disinfect certain trojans. There used to be certain programs like F-PROT and F-Secure that were pretty reliable. Lately it seems that the hackers have gotten the upper hand and nothing really works.

Umm... do you update the virus definitions?

Whether or not this is because of the dissemination of XP, as Gibson asserts is debatable, but the way I see it, the problem is very serious and getting worse.

The release of XP has absolutely nothing to do with anything... There are definately various holes, but the implication that Gibson makes in his DDoS article that the ability to modify TCP/IP packets at the client software level is somehow a bad idea is ludicrous. People who wanted to do so for bad reasons were already able to do so by simple modifications of the OS. This simply allows legitimate uses of these features that are available using pretty much any other OS and TCP/IP stack. Universal Plug & Play does, however, have a potential to be bad.
 
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