[ Thanks to Bob Hyde for
this link. ]
“This corporation — let’s arbitrarily honour comic Phil Silvers
and call it BillCo, shall we? — BillCo has had a spot of legal
trouble lately… It was at this cusp in BillCo’s corporate
history that an unfortunate occurrence unfortunately occurred. One
of the most popular of its many products contains an innovative
feature — ironically, one of the few genuinely original features
ever offered by BillCo — called “scripting,” which unfortunately
is really not a feature but a bug. A gaping security flaw, in fact,
begging to be exploited: a backdoor big enough to admit a
Visigoth horde in full kit without waking the watchdog.”
“Get this: BillCo’s e-mail agent — let’s call it LookOut! —
was deliberately designed to let strangers send you e-mail that can
issue commands to your computer without consulting you. No, really!
If you use BillCo’s operating system — let’s call it OpenWindow —
and run LookOut!, your computer’s no longer merely user-friendly:
It’s now a user-slut; one too dumb to carry condoms, or even take
names.”
“Turns out quite a few people use LookOut! and some version of
OpenWindow. Collectively they lost a fair amount of time and data
— and money — and it’s safe to say many are unhappy. It’s only a
matter of time before they all wise up, and figure out out how the
vandals got in. When they do, they’ll have things to say, and some
may decide to say it with subpoenas.”