I don’t get it. How does someone who claims to be a programmer and technologist end up with a rootkit almost as soon as he plugs it into a network? In a great many years of windows computing, I have yet to come within spitting distance of a rootkit. That’s not because I’m especially clever, it’s because, as a general rule, you get those sorts of things from doing things you shouldn’t be doing to begin with. Pirating software and movies, for example. Visiting questionable websites. Et cetera.
What on earth is Dave doing with his PC?
(One thing he’s doing with it is contributing to increased costs for amazon: by returning a product he broke 1 2). These will be good things to keep in mind the next time he calls out some company for shitty customer service: he’s the guy that abuses the system and ruins things for everyone. He’s the kind of guy who is a reason for shitty customer service.
Seriously – isn’t this the third or fourth time he’s wound up with an infected machine in the last year? I can’t keep track any more but your question is the exact same one I asked when I saw his complaint about a rootkit on a brand new machine. Dave must just download everything and anything onto his PC without any real thought about choosing wisely. For a guy who claims to be the father of some of the basic internet communication technologies he truly is brain dead.
BTW, did anyone else happen to notice his tweet about SXSW:
Never been to SXSW — my streak remains intact in 2009. Maybe someday they’ll ask me to talk about something, but not till then…7:20 AM Mar 6th from web
Classic Winer – unless they can recognize “my importance” why would I denigrate myself to grace them with my presence.
My guess: porn sites of the shadiest type.
Wow, what a mensch. Here’s to hoping he loses all his cash somehow and has to buy a refurb on Evilbay just to get at his barely-legal double-treasure media.
My guess is that he’s downloading movies and TV shows before they air over BitTorrent and getting malware that way. Amusing to see him immediately leap to the conclusion that Java is the root of his rootkit problems, all on the basis of one comment to Scripting News. What a tool.
Remember Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained more easily by stupidity. It’s not malware, it’s dave’s incompetence. Anyone remember when userland’s server went down for a week due to a worm, because dave never bothered to apply security updates?
The hypocrisy comes so fast it’s hard to keep up.
Today: “If it were actually open they’d announce it to all developers at the same moment, so we could all try it out at the same time on a level playing field, not give an advance to their favorites.”
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/10/folksThisIsInNoWayOpen.html
How many of Winer’s projects have been released first to private beta testers — all of them? Does that mean none of his open source projects could be called open?