Absolute, monumental stupidity at NPR
Jul. 8th, 2009 09:38 pmThis afternoon, NPR's "All Things Considered" had two tech stories back to back that demonstrate absolutely everything that is wrong with with tech reporting.
In the first article, NPR host Robert Siegel and reporter Ari Shapiro discussed an coordinated denial-of-service attack against various American government institutions. The attack occurred over the weekend, and took down some of the US and South Korea's best-known government and media websites for an extended period. Ari Shapiro, with complete innocence, described the attack as coming from "a network of some 50,000 zombie computers."
In the second article, Wendy Kaufman reported on the Google Chrome OS, a vaporware announcement from Google that it was going to marry a new windowing environment based on the Chromium base with a Linux kernel and market it as an alternative to the current crop of operating systems. With a complete lack of reflection, Kaufman told Siegel that "90% of all computers out there are running Microsoft Windows."
It takes a special lack of awareness for an editor to run these two stories back-to-back without somehow illuminating the fact that the entirety of the botnet runs on Microsoft Windows. NPR does its listeners a disservice when it fails to point out that individuals can be running Windows and not know that their machine is infected and controlled by nefarious outsiders, that owning a Windows box is an attractive nuisance to criminals who would use it to attack our own government and our own country, and Microsoft has failed in its legal duty of care to protect its users and its nation of origin.
Someday, when the final financial reckoning is done, Microsoft will be remembered as fondly as Bernie Madoff. It will have become an enormous public company without regard for its responsibilities to its customers, and the total cost of ownership of Microsoft products will have to include the price needed to protect Windows from itself, the cost of recovery after an attack, the burdens imposed by corrupted Windows installations, and the overall loss of GDP resulting from downtime.
NPR should point out that zombie botnets run Windows, and running something else, anything else, denying criminals access to your hardware, is both a financial and moral boon.
In the first article, NPR host Robert Siegel and reporter Ari Shapiro discussed an coordinated denial-of-service attack against various American government institutions. The attack occurred over the weekend, and took down some of the US and South Korea's best-known government and media websites for an extended period. Ari Shapiro, with complete innocence, described the attack as coming from "a network of some 50,000 zombie computers."
In the second article, Wendy Kaufman reported on the Google Chrome OS, a vaporware announcement from Google that it was going to marry a new windowing environment based on the Chromium base with a Linux kernel and market it as an alternative to the current crop of operating systems. With a complete lack of reflection, Kaufman told Siegel that "90% of all computers out there are running Microsoft Windows."
It takes a special lack of awareness for an editor to run these two stories back-to-back without somehow illuminating the fact that the entirety of the botnet runs on Microsoft Windows. NPR does its listeners a disservice when it fails to point out that individuals can be running Windows and not know that their machine is infected and controlled by nefarious outsiders, that owning a Windows box is an attractive nuisance to criminals who would use it to attack our own government and our own country, and Microsoft has failed in its legal duty of care to protect its users and its nation of origin.
Someday, when the final financial reckoning is done, Microsoft will be remembered as fondly as Bernie Madoff. It will have become an enormous public company without regard for its responsibilities to its customers, and the total cost of ownership of Microsoft products will have to include the price needed to protect Windows from itself, the cost of recovery after an attack, the burdens imposed by corrupted Windows installations, and the overall loss of GDP resulting from downtime.
NPR should point out that zombie botnets run Windows, and running something else, anything else, denying criminals access to your hardware, is both a financial and moral boon.
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