I can hear the booo and hisses already, but this is a large reason why I fucking hate Windows. Let's be real here, everyone getting hacked by these knuckleheads are idiots themselves (to a degree) AND running windows. But what about this: I just imaged and updated my Windows 7 64 system, only use Firefox, and have Microsoft AV (free) enabled. I was minding my own business surfing the web in what I thought was a fairly secure setup, some random popup or link injected code through what I believe was a flash vulnerability (again the box was only a month old) and installed some fucked up rootkit that MS AV actually found the next day. WTF? 0-day exploits CRUSH windows, despite the UAV etc, some how this shit still gets through. Yes, I could have done probably xyz things to protect myself, which I would believe if I were running XP, but this is a 1Mo old version of 7, automatic updates, and I only use firefox. FML.

Web browsers should run in a VM session that is incompatible with the host operating system on a binary level. This kind of aformentioned horseshit rarely if ever happens to everyday average normal guys just browsing the web on their Macs or Ubuntu boxes. Also, fuck it, I'm only browsing the web on a Linux image from now on on this Windows box (and just for reference the box is only used for gaming, occasionally slashdot raging)

It occurred to me how obsolete television has become in my life after reading this thread and realizing that at one point in my life, TV was actually *important*. I remember coming home from school and turning it on, watching TV for hours on end and that was was "OK". After the Interwebs and PCs took over as my main source of *everything digitally consumable*, I never looked back. A week ago a family member bought a new 70' Sharp TV (all the rage right?) and offered to give us their maybe 5 year old 50' rear projection TV (imagine a 50' Sony that has 3x more depth than a newer LCD). Without hesitation I turned them down, why? Because I have two relatively new large LCD TVs that I _never_ use. I realize my younger years I would have killed for such a device, for free. My view on TV is a mix of nostalgia and worthlessness. Like Landline phones, CRTs, VHS, Palm PDAs (lol) and so on.

Except for Breaking Bad.. Best. Show. Ever. And I watch it on Netflix and iTunes, so I guess I'm not really even talking about a TV show anymore.

I like ESXi for the handful of random non-production systems I use. I just don't buy that VM is the right direction for every company as a primary platform. Sure, small scale VM has it's benefits, but in a large scale scenario the overhead and vendor lock in becomes short sighted. Yes, eventually with enough VM in your datacenter, you'll save money, but at what long term expense? What's that vendor proprietary solution going to do for you in 10 years when you want to move to the next big thing? I say build out your DC using commodity hardware and design your applications and network with fault tolerance and efficiency in mind. Need a more efficient footprint? Try microservers http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-c5125/pd 1. Focus on getting the best bang for your buck with commodity hardware 2. Focus your people on streamlining operations for this model (instead of focusing on how to integrate VM with existing models, etc) 3. Design your applications/architecture around not having some magical single box with a thousand mac addresses that can move around the data center on a whim. Who would be dumb enough to believe in this model? Google and Facebook, for starters.

Ya'll are crazy. Crazy I tell you. You can just do what the GOV does and wiretap your traffic for irregular behavior (related to root-kits and other malicious code) running on your network, at any layer. I'm sure the shady bastards in china have TRIED to put back doors in the software/hardware but there are ways to detect them. So, whenever you get a new piece of equipment, upgrade the code to whatever the vendor is offering (ie. at clean version) and do a little packet inspection to see what's really happening. Has anyone actually found any REAL evidence of what the article is proposing? A massive conspiracy of hardware and software-based back doors from the government of China..No. If it existed there would be more evidence of it. There isn't any that I'm aware of (public knowledge could be suppressed but that's another topic) This is not much better than 1950's McCarthy rampant speculation. It's healthy paranoia at best.