Annoyance

Someone out there who has both Elaine and I in their address books (which narrows it down to about a thousand people, thanks to the mailing lists we are on) has one of the newer wave of e-mail worms. I have received now two messages "from" Elaine bounced off the same zombie in Finland. So, that IP is blocked, the upstream ISP has been notified. I find it weird that the combination of the same "from" address and IP would appear twice.

This, however is indicative of a greater annoyance: Microsoft's no-updates-if-you-haven't-paid policy is a menace. All too many people out in the world have pirated copies of Windows that they can't update, and instead of this policy making money for M$ by forcing users to ante-up, it in fact costs everyone else money in all the lost time and extra traffic generated by these long-since-patched exploits continuing to exist in the wild on the sea of unpatchable machines out there.