Afternoon Tech news: Infinium Labs, the long-secretive video-game company, today took the wraps off of its Phantom gaming console and service, setting a Nov. 18 launch for the system designed to .
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"Helping his mom." Death's too good for him.
So HP's custom-built gaming machines will range from $1599-3000. That's funny; just this past weekend my friends put together a gaming machine for $1000 in parts. Of course, their labor was free, but it only took a few hours since they knew what they were doing. Add on another hour or so to install Windows XP and Office, and a mere three hours have gone by. Does that really cost $600? I'll be really curious to see what kind of machine HP can build for $1599. Mine is plenty powerful for games; plenty of RAM, video, and processor power to last a few years. I certainly hope HP isn't charing $3000 for what I just built for a third of the cost.
What you have here is a 17 year old kid who just threw together some software as an experiment, then was himself surprised at the effect. This is not a new story: cf. the Morris worm (1988).
The people who made billions of dollars selling substandard software that's so fragile and hard to keep patched up to date that a random kid messing around can bring the net to its knees are the problem. As are the whiny companies who bought, installed and became dependent on that software, and are then surprised when they have huge problems with it.
Kids writing worms and viruses are simply the operating environment of modern software, like any other component of the hardware and network. Kill all you like, but there will always be more. And those people who death's too good for are the ones who might one day grow up to be the sort of halfway-clueful developers and sysadmins who could lead us out of this mess.
The kid is the messenger, one of legion. The vulnerable software is what he's telling you about. Deal with the real problem, not the message.
Oh yeah, and learn some bloody perspective. It's malware; it's not the end of the world. And if it were, because companies and institutions had become so dependent on weak software, we'd frankly deserve it for putting ourselves in such a vulnerable situation.
I could not agree more.
What you have here is a 17 year old kid who just threw together some software as an experiment, then was himself surprised at the effect. This is not a new story: cf. the Morris worm (1988).
Umm, except they also suspect him of all the Netsky variants. One is an experiment. Multiple is intent.
Actually, multiple is pretty much de rigeur for experimental inquiry; reproducibility is, after all, the core of the scientific method. ;)
Interesting point, though: they say they suspect him of authoring all the Netsky variants. Yet he came forward and admitted to Sasser. So why would he admit to the one and not the other(s)? Perhaps this is law enforcement trying to kill twenty-two birds with one stone.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2001
Knew It...
Well, we always knew that computers that continuously break is one way to ensure that there's plenty of business fixing them (which seems awfully suspicious as the reason Wintel is so popular with IT guys), and here we have the world's most destructive worm written by the son of a computer repair shop owner. Oho!
On a more serious note, it does tell you something about the way Windows is built when an 18 year old working out of his parents basement can bring the business computers of the world to their knees.