A tentative welcome to the new Cyberscrutinizer Howard Schmidt.

Let's see if he has what it takes to say what must be said.
Hint: it's about the elephant in the room.

Just today I was taken aback a little by this factoid: In November 2009 a mere 97 percent of all email was spam. If nobody else is going to let the cat out of the bag, I guess I'll have to.

While it's true that spammers are to blame for spam, that's not the only part of the problem. It is also true that Micro$oft is to blame for their crappy software. It's like swiss cheese, and always has been. Virus writers love it -- it's like playing dungeons and dragons, or super mario, or whatever.

Yesterday at work I figured out why our network was crapping out -- one of the PCs was infected and sending out a storm of I-don't-know-what whenever it was running and on the net. So far we've extracted eight viruses and a trojan*, and it's still raising hell whenever we let it onto the network. God knows what it's sending out, but after we unplug it there's still reverberations for a little while, probably error messages; when we run speed tests at about ten-second intervals it climbs from about half of normal speed to full speed in a couple of minutes.

*MacAfee has found these but it's not finding everything. Our IT guys had already started wondering whether they ought to try another brand of cleanser. Personally I'd recommend giving Avast a whirl. See separate post about this.

So. As we were saying. Mr. Schmidt has to do something he might find difficult if he is to get anywhere: come down hard and in plain language on the Micro$oft Problem. FWIW I'm writing on a Mac. And funny thing, the guy at the office whose PC is zombied has Macs at home too.