This is cool: MT and MS join forces to destroy each other!

Say what? 'Fraid so -- the two are combining mutual weaknesses to create a juggernaut of an attack on their users, and what's the best hoot of all, both companies will earnestly express shock and outrage and like Nero at the sack of Rome, insist it is none of their faults.

Here's what happens: Every MT owner knows the joys of spending hours every week scraping the shite off their site thanks to the naive design of the Movabletype comment-form security (not) -- it's just one more of the costs of using their 'free' kit. Now, you couple this with a new and frightenly gross security flaw in MSIE ... Wide-open ubiquitous auto-posting of any weblink plus a ubiquitous browser that will grant any webpage supreme authority over the O/S, it was only a matter of time

Two days time, in fact: The MS flaw was reported by the BBC only just last week, and it seems the mafia has put two and two together because already I'm scraping comments that all read the most innocent of text, linking the name to a page laced with the MSIE exploit.

who you gonna ban now

These first few are easy targets for Jay Allen; the posts all point to a numbered host address where the trap is deployed, but as the BBC reports, the link could just as easily be to a bank, an auction house or any one of a thousand legitimate websites ... and given the ease of spreading this over security flaws in the Microsoft IIS webserver, by the time you read this, that could be tens of thousands of website.

getting to the root of the problem

Like I said over there, there's probably no sense in tell you any of this. Those of you already on proper network operating systems and sanely crafted browsers will just nod you heads knowingly, and the sociopath masochist 93% rest of you will just scoff and shrug and say "who cares?" and carry on with your online lives, proudly knowing you've made that personal free choice to freely and selflessly aid organized crime in one of their most profitable schemes ever, all the while simultaneously ensuring everyone's mailbox carries the smallest possible signal to noise ratio ...

I'm no lawyer, but it's obvious these Windows users run their fave O/S intentionally, in full knowledge of the consequences, yet they do so persistently and unapologetically, without regard for other persons or property -- it's a far worse risk than second-hand smoke or keeping chickens in their backyard and unlike those nasty habits, theirs knowingly and openly assists all sorts of illegal, questionably legal, and unethical activity -- do you suppose perchance there might be some viable legal process to bring a charge of "aiding, abetting and financing criminal activities" whereby we might arrest and criminally prosecute people for using Windows?

Or at least maybe a rush of municipal Windows free zones by-laws?