SCO acts as Microsoft shill to attack Linux

The Inquirer ^ | 13 March 2004 | Charlie Demerjian

[ShadowAce]

[glorgau]

This scam is just about done with its run.

[Wonder Warthog]

"That brings us back to goldfish. MS will lay low for a bit, and then try it again. It can't beat Linux on price, it can't beat Linux on quality, it can't beat Linux on security."

Unfortunately, it "can" beat Linux on applications--which, ultimately, is where it counts. Hopefully, that will change.

[Bush2000]

Or, alternatively, "Linux Community Acts as IBM Shill"

[rdb3]

The Penguin Ping.

Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!

Got root?

[isthisnickcool]

Or, alternatively, "Linux Community Acts as IBM Shill"

You are just silly sometimes B2K.

I ran across Linus himself in 1991 and have been using Linux for many years. Currently, we have numerous Linux servers. IBM had nothing to do with that. We have numerous Windows 2003 servers too. IBM had nothing to do with that either.

I've seen your posts that either bash Linux or cheerlead for Microsoft. Over and over and over. So many and so often it's bizarre. The Linux/Microsoft topic just isn't important. At least not enough for someone to spend so much time on the topic like you do.

Get a life.....

[Petronski]

cheerlead for Microsoft

It's called 'astroturfing,' as in, operating a 'fake grassroots' movement. It used to be called schilling.

[Golden Eagle]

Not that this will slow them down, goldfish, remember? Antitrust, EU, monopoly, shiny thing, what is my name, wow, renamed technology, licence agreement, Software Assurance, loud noise, patch patch patch, where was I again?

Who knows, much less cares. These foreign websites you guys constantly peddle aren't worth the time they waste.

[ThePythonicCow]

Thanks for the ping. Good read.

[antiRepublicrat]

These foreign websites you guys constantly peddle aren't worth the time they waste.

Yeah, sites from the country that's our biggest ally, with a government that has massive Microsoft contracts across the board.

[Golden Eagle]

It's just that I've already seen a thousand "blah blah blah, Microsoft will die" articles from those guys for many years, none of which ever remotely come true. Here's a more likely prediction of the future from American journalists:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550914,00.asp

However, bogus IT predictions aside, this IS an interesting article from a foreign website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3520636.stm

[Salo]

Totally offtopic: one of my vendors has something up with his email. The body of the email they send has a php file in it. All I can get from this vendor is "we have a problem with our email system and are working to correct it."

My virus scanners (today's definitions) on my windows boxes are not detecting a virus. My email client on my windows boxes say that activex will not run due to our security settings.

Any ideas what is up? When I open the php file with my text editor on my imac, all it says is "windows update."

The vendor is using an exchange/outlook system.

[Golden Eagle]

How do you know they are using Exchange? PHP is not typically used on MS systems, especially mail servers. If there's any web components on Exchange it would normally be IIS for Outlook Web Access which uses ASP.

I can't really see a connection with Windows Update either. All I can guess (without charging a fee, LOL), looks like the introduction of PHP has gunked up their normally perfectly operational MS environment.

That's a joke of course, but it's hard to imagine an internal Exchange MTA or queue malfunction that would be spewing messages of any kind with "windows update" embedded in an attached php file to random recipients (if I understood you correctly). That would mean someone would have originally created that sort of a file. Last guess is that is how they are attempting to update their clients, with some sort of automatically distributed message that contains php logic to autmatically connect them to Windows Update and patch when executed. Doubtful, but what else makes sense.

[Nick Danger]

The body of the email they send has a php file in it

PHP is a server-side technology. The odds of finding a Windows client that has PHP running, and knows to send .php files to the PHP interpreter, are slim to none. It's probably not an attempted virus, it's an idiot at work somewhere in their company.

[Salo]

They keep trying to sell me an exchange system. :-) They've used exchange/outlook for years. We are in the process of replacing our email system now: they got wind of it and their sales weasels were on me like white on rice.

How do you know they are using Exchange?

[Salo]

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus. They've clammed-up. Won't tell me what is going on. A certain subset of my users keeps getting these messages, which is how we knew where they were coming from even with the fake addresses. Hard to say what's up with them: they turn over a lot of people, so a misconfiguration is certainly not beyond the realm of possibilty.

It's probably not an attempted virus, it's an idiot at work somewhere in their company.

[Nick Danger]

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus

It takes one idiot virus writer to imagine that he can send a php script to email clients, and somehow get the script executed on the client machine. If somebody really did that, you can almost bet that his "virus" sends you his passwords and credit card numbers... it's that dumb.

Any chance that this is a link? That it's trying to get you to go to "http://www.badguys.com/hoseyou.php" ?

[Golden Eagle]

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus.

That would make the most sense, but your scans are clean, and php is probably not executable without being hosted somehow. The payload could have been stripped by AV software somewhere up the chain, but normally you would get a text notification of that in the delivered message.

Doesn't really add up, but Exchange is an excellent collaborative (including mail) system, I have extensive experience managing a large scale environment (several thousand users) and virus attacks were the only real problems we ever had. Individual mailbox restores are a little cumbersome, but with an available spare system (needed with an operation of that size anyway) we were able to work those issues quite easily with experience. It's probably the best overall product on the market, but I admit I haven't used IBM's offerings personally, only Groupwise, which basically sucked. So what are you going with, and why?

[Salo]

I can't tell: my current work client (Groupwise) won't excecute whatever code is in the email - in fact, I could not even see anything in the body of the mail. The mail looked blank. I went home, logged in and forwarded the mail to my mac to see what I could do with it. It is a php file in the body of the mail. When I opened that up with a text editor, all it says is "Windows Update." Other than annoying me, it does not appear to be doing anything. I just get very concerned when I get mail with faked headers that is attempting to execute - especially when I know it's coming from an MS shop. We've never had a problem with the vendor before, but this was just too much to ignore.

Any chance that this is a link? That it's trying to get you to go to "http://www.badguys.com/hoseyou.php" ?