“We live in a world of standards. Imagine what life would be
like if each manufacturer had her own standard for plugging her
appliance into the wall socket. Imagine life without Phillips
screws. Standards are a Active Visual Good Thing++ ™ (C)
(pat pending) (maybe I need to stop browsing Microsoft’s site?) in
general. But not necessarily in computers. Heretical? Maybe. Crazy?
Definitely. Read on.“
“Take the latest fiasco: the ILOVEYOU virus. A friend sent
himself the virus on e-mail and read the same using two clients: a
Linux computer with Netscape Messenger and an NT box with Outlook
something-or-the-other. Guess which one started behaving funny
afterwards? And this one is just the latest in a long history of
viruses/trojans which need well-defined and tight environments to
run and propagate.”
“Not that our friends from Redmond here are the only ones
involved. For example, the teardrop, boink and other ping of death
attacks were so successful precisely because they exploited a
standard: the Internet Protocol (IP, commonly mis-referred to as
TCP/IP) stack. Nearly every architecture and operating system
(including Linux) running IP was vulnerable. On the other hand,
people running old versions of Novell, SNA and DecNET were laughing
their guts out, wondering what the whole brouhaha was about. (I
presume there are still some of these people alive and
kicking.)”