Microsoft offers reward to catch worm maker

A reward of $250,000.00 USD....If they put a few more zeros in that figure they would have these guys by the end of the day.

at least it's a start. even the posse's not made o'money.

let's cut'em off at the pass

Yes, M.S. is just playing the game trying to appear they are doing something.
$250,000 USD is a joke. How many Windows PC's are infected? 9 million?

I'd say offer a dollar a PC and yes, we'd know who did it quick.

$250,000 USD is a joke.

They should focus on fixing their shitty code instead, theirs is the cheapest, worst coding the world has ever seen and we are all victims of their stupidity.

Take for example usb drives, if it weren't for m$ morons adding autorun option to usb drives infections would be much more limited and manegable, but no they wanted to save someone one click at the drive icon! Too bad they didn't realize those people would gladly learn how to open it in exchange for not having to deal with spyware and viruses fouling their computers.

Luckily for the world their stupidity is slowly catching up with them, too bad it will be a slow and agonizing death.

superhuman-actually MS code is extremely elegant, the part of it that sucks is that its not open sourced to make sure folks cant steal their code out of the box and base an OS off it..aka, competition creation. This is actually smart from a business and security perspective for obvious reasons.
Autorun can be very easily disabled...so not worth arguing that fact....but I will say, it was out before USB drives were in high quantity on the market, so those were not even originally a factor...what was is the ability to pop a music CD in, or a software CD, and have it start without the "cumbersome" task of opening my computer and hunting down the song or setup file manually.

If you release the same exact type of worm, trojan, or virus that has the same intentions onto say, a UNIX system, chances are, that system will be screwed long before Windows is...and stay screwed until a reload occurs. The upside to that, admittedly, is that since things like unix are open sourced, it makes it much more likely that some, any , developer off the street can come up with a quick fix.

I do IT for a living, and a lot of it in the programming realm (ok, my mgmt role currently has me doing less than I'd like admittedly)..but I've seen both sides, and no OS is safe from this.

Odds are the source of the problem..33% straight crime related, 33% evil hacker.. and... 33% chance of it being a government/corporate/black ops, either local or otherwise. The odds of it being a separate competing corporation or the creators of security software? VERY low. The Risks are way too high.

For those of you who are not aware of the multiple levels the world works on, there is a fully blown balls on war happening right now, between the world's elite power structures.

Which moves the corporate/government/black ops option of possibility to 'front and center'....and those folks will NOT EVER be 'turned out' for a few shekels.

For the rest of you..forget everything you just read..and go back to sleep...Sleep..sleep.

actually MS code is extremely elegant,

I am very curious why do you think it is "extremely elegant"?

It's exactly the opposite when I am concerned, an elegant code should at least catch and report errors properly something m$ never learned to do. An elegant code contains tools for tracking and reporting what is actually happening in the system, m$ never bothered with it.

I can give you an example of an elegant windows code which should have been part of windows from the start - small and extremely useful tools written by Mark Russinovich from Sysinternals. They are easily the best and indispensable tools for managing all windows systems and they were written by one guy and offered for free! Why m$ with programmer workforce in many thousands couldn't do it? What does it say about them? They themselves used those tools so often in their technical advices that they eventually bought up Sysinternals to avoid continuing embarrassment!

the part of it that sucks is that its not open sourced

No that's hardly a problem, and those who want to steal it will do so anyway no matter if it's open source or not.

This is actually smart from a business and security perspective for obvious reasons.

Security through obscurity is a *VERY* bad idea and a primary reason why we have so many holes in computer security today.

Autorun can be very easily disabled...so not worth arguing that fact....

Of course it can be easily disabled, but the problem is it is enabled by default and most people won't know they should do it.

but I will say, it was out before USB drives were in high quantity on the market, so those were not even originally a factor...what was is the ability to pop a music CD in, or a software CD, and have it start without the "cumbersome" task of opening my computer and hunting down the song or setup file manually.

The option should never be allowed to be enabled for drives which can be written on, there were enough problems with viruses during the floppy era to know it was extremely irresponsible, and even for read-only ones it was unnecessary. It's just one example of the usual extreme shortsightedness on m$ side, just as the case with shipping computers with firewall turned off, DCOM enabled and countless other blunders.

I do IT for a living, and a lot of it in the programming realm (ok, my mgmt role currently has me doing less than I'd like admittedly)..but I've seen both sides, and no OS is safe from this.

No OS is safe but that doesn't mean OS can't be made safe, especially with the money m$ has available, too bad they are stuffed with too many sucky programmers to ever write a decent piece of software. There will eventually be a safe OS but it will take much longer then it would without m$ monopoly.