Microsoft is the world's biggest cause of zombie remailers

TAKE A LOOK AT China and the Internet. Here in the middle kingdom, we are looking at between 103 and 112 million Internet users, maybe many more than that.

Forbes estimates that China has surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users. The numbers do not tell the full story.

In China, these 113 million or more users are first time users. I have run several educational website servers here, and I run one now. The number of port scans and the firewall activity would knock you over. My logs are an ugly testament to pernicious computer viruses and mostly uneducated users.

Now don't get me wrong here. Nobody should need a PhD to, for instance, install Linux. Facile and mundane, day-to-day use is not what I am talking about.

The choice here is Windows. That's it. Nothing else can be found. It is all faux Windows, however. Trouble is, your average punter here has no idea it ain't the real deal. You all sit around and tsk tsk about piracy, but you have an option. Folks here do not.

I sometimes take my USB thumbdrive to class to post a file for the students. When I bring it back home, I always have to cleanse it. Nasty stuff all around.

I give the students a URL for my student information site. As soon as I get back home, there are hundreds, or even thousands of port scans on my site. Not initiated by the students, but by the shite MS operating systems that are all they can get.

Let me say this again, and very clearly. They just can't get anything better. Ripoff and illegal MS crap is what they have, because they can't get legitimate software.

You are lucky in the West. You can preach about the wrongs of the East with blissful ignorance. Here in the East it is a matter of making do with what there is.

In China, it would take about one and one-half years wages (for the average Chinese) to buy a legitimate copy of Windows Vista. If you could find it here.

Microsoft is the biggest cause of zombie remailers in the world, because they make noises, but do not do anything to address the real digital inequities in the world.

Flame now, flame often. µ

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