I am a late convert. Bill-the-Gates crushed OS/2. I worked around it. He published version after version of bug-ridden slop and I made a living off of it. From C to C++ through COM, COM+, .NET, whatever. The theme is the same: low-quality, obfuscated software with a high rate of updates. Today I finally hit the wall.
I got hacked. It manifested on an e-commerce site. Info was being sent to some Russian hole ostensibly to facilitate stealing my payment info. The Russian site disappeared which left me with an odd error about not finding this heretofore unknown site. Of course I was pissed. I thought that I had exceptional computer hygene.
Here is the part that sent me over. The first thing I did was look for a rogue plug-in. Plug-ins never got the attention that ActiveX problems did. The UI showed nothing unusual but anything plugged-in I disabled, silently cursing the lack of removal functionality. Still the hack remained: my pages were being parsed and edited before display. Finally I got out p-explorer and found some POS dll running under iexplore.exe. It was a plug-in. Imagine my surprise. It turns out that one can mark plug-ins so that they won't display in the IE interface (as with most other plug-in venues: VB, Office, etc.).
Need I ask why an interface to manage plug-ins would allow anyone to hide one from me? Especially when 'hide' usually means simply increase the effort to manage them? The 'advanced' option to hide it is given to the hackers and crackers and jackers and corproate weenies, but the 'advanced' option to know whats running on my own system is to be denied me?
I still remember the line from "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Jobs says to Gates "our stuff is better" and he quips in reply "it won't matter". I curse Bill the Gates. I wouldn't piss on Bill Gates if his heart were on fire.
