The Redstone Redmond Cops
By Mitch Berg
The good news: one of the biggest spambot networks has been busted.
The Rustock botnet, an international network of virus-infected computers, had for years generated billions of emails per day, promoting unlicensed online pharmacies and cut-price impotence pills.
Good riddance.
But this was mildly jarring (emphasis added):
But on Wednesday, security firms noticed email traffic from Rustock completely collapsed. It has now been revealed that Microsoft, backed by US Marshals acting on a court order, seized servers that it’s estimated covertly controlled almost a million Windows PCs.
“We think this has been 100 per cent effective,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney in Microsoft’s digital crimes unit, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Well, that’s cool. But back that thing up a minute.
Microsoft has a “digital crimes unit?”
Like, its own internal CTU?
OK, maybe. But I’m just picturing what kind of equipment would be appropriate for a Microsoft SWAT team:
- Firearms: The Chauchat light machine gun, the Sten Mark II submachine gun, and the Nambu 8mm pistol (1)
- The Microsoft Cyber-Assault Vehicle (a ’77 Leyland Land Rover (2) with a TomTom)
- Surveillance Cameras and Laptop Computers by Hewlett Packard
- Arrest Warrant Printers by Lexmark.
What else?
(1) Note for non-gun-geeks; all three are legendary for their unreliability. Sorta like Windows.
(2) Ditto
March 22nd, 2011 at 7:46 am
Funny, it was Micro$oft who busted Rustock and not Apple. Had to reboot 7 yet? My son’s iPad gets hung up at least once every couple of days – never mind not doing Flash. Ever wonder what OS airplanes run on those in-seat entertainment systems they have to reboot every couple of hours? I don’t think penguin is a Micro$oft TM.
March 22nd, 2011 at 7:54 am
The MS DCU would also have a large supply of Coke, Mountain Dew and Cheetos.
March 22nd, 2011 at 8:48 am
And Beano.
March 22nd, 2011 at 9:11 am
I upgraded one of my laptops to KDE4. What krep. Massive performance hit, unreliable, and very difficult to go back to KDE3.
But with KDE4 I get consoles that only become opaque when they are focused!
Just like XP+Cygwin has been doing since last year.
March 22nd, 2011 at 11:24 am
Terry, the fact that you admit going to KDE4 isn’t a point in your favor. That’s been a well-known clusterfark for years.
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:23 pm
I’ve been running my home desktop on Ubuntu for a couple years now It’s been great (although I still need to figure what’s up with the ALSA/JACK configuration that’s keeping me from letting my MIDI keyboard (musical instrument, not user interface) run Bristol/Brighton, the *really* nifty keyboard emulator…
March 22nd, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Any recommendations for a good netbook Linux distro/desktop?
March 22nd, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Right on cue from Powerline:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028661.php
Same piece of junk, only more expensive.
March 22nd, 2011 at 2:10 pm
The KDE4 story is long and sad, Nerdbert.
I keep all my permanent important stuff on a 60GB USB hardrive. It’s my home directory. I plug it into any one of three or four computers when I’m doing work.
One of my linux disks died so I put in a new hard drive & went reinstall but I couldn’t find my old Debian Lenny netinstall CD. I grabbed the Debian Squeeze install image and worked with that.
It really is bad. Highly unstable and breaks in odd ways. You finally get everything going and then the mouse cursor disappears and won’t come back. Or you disable the compwiz crap and then your KDE apps show up in 8 bit color. It’s a frikkin’ nightmare.
I switched from Kwin to fluxbox as a WM but the KDE desktop stuff is like an infection that keeps coming back.
March 22nd, 2011 at 5:03 pm
If it was an apple strike force team they’d surrender.
March 22nd, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Mitch-
Have you looked at Rosegarden?
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
The jack/jackd stuff is a pain to set up but I managed it once. Whatever I played on my Yamaha keyboard (via a midi to USB module) came out as sheet music on the display.
Rosegarden had more firepower than this plinker could find a use for.
March 23rd, 2011 at 7:30 am
I’ll have to give Rosegarden a try.
But what i”m looking for is fairly simple; Brighton is basically a music keyboard emulator, emulating a bunch of classic synthesizers and organs (I mainly wanted the Hammond B3, Vox Continental Prophet 5 and Yamaha DX7); Bristol is a GUI that gives you a screen that look like the controls for each of those keyboards (including the switches and drawbars on the B3). If you play the key via the GUI, it works – you get the sounds through the speakers. But you can’t really play a song via a mouse. And the system isnt’ reading my MIDI keyboard (via USB).
Gotta figure out how to make that connection, and it’ll be golden.