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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energy_investor who wrote (44432)	5/7/2000 4:38:00 PM
From: SunSpot	Respond to of 74651

MSFT has to stay out of this virus mess. No matter how you choose to see it, most viruses today are Visual Basic viruses. And the "I love you" virus does not exploit a security hole - Outlook is meant to work that way. MSFTs defense must be, that people want it to work that way. If focus changes from the consumer to MSFT, it will not help the stocks.

To: energy_investor who wrote (44432)	5/8/2000 1:19:00 AM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

As I said in an earlier post, MSFT is being very quiet about this whole mess -- there is more to this than meets the eye. Like what? Do you think Microsoft created this virus? Put up or shut up.

To: energy_investor who wrote (44432)	5/8/2000 7:59:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Ray - Pretty silly argument about MSFT and virus liability. While it is true that in the US almost anyone can sue over anything, the argument that MSFT has a liability here seems pretty far fetched. Many posting about this issue on this thread seem to have forgotten that up until quite recently, all of the big virus scares were on Unix machines, and even the most recent denial of service attacks against the big web sites were primarily driven by slaved Unix machines. I am not much of a hacker, but I am experienced in both Unix and MSFT systems administration, and I find it a lot easier to discover security breaches in Unix systems than MSFT ones. This is not because Unix is inherently less secure, but because the culture of the Unix community has been more "trusting". Many university and research machines have virtually no security in place. It is fairly easy to implement security policies which limit the impact of most virus attacks. The reason everyone does not do that routinely is because it also limits the capabilities for many other activities, and puts already lazy end users in the position of having to go to additional trouble to do their day to day jobs. I have seen how hard it is to simply implement a policy which forces users to choose a moderately secure password and to change that password every few months. I can only imagine the screams of outrage if people were deprived of their "seamless access". BTW, policy-based secure administration is in general easier to implement and enforce on MSFT systems than on most Unix systems. So I doubt that MSFT has any more liability than anyone else in the food chain.