"And where exactly are all these attacks coming from. Where are these worms and viruses hosted. What's different is all the attacks are coming for other compromised Windows boxen. Of course it's totally different, you're not being attacked by Linux boxes."

You have a point, I would be stupid not to agree the it's probably mostly infected Windows machines. I just don't think that's what the summary is saying. When the text of the link to the article says "how vulnerable Windows XP really is", i read it as that, not as "how many infected Windows XP boxes are out there."

The point of the article, IMO at least, is to remind people how quickly an unpatched Windows machine gets infected and therefore how important it is to keep your OS updated. That they used an updated "secured" Windows installation to host the virtual machine sort of shows this, I would say. I just think simply saying "Windows XP is unsecure" is not really what this article is trying to say and that the summary was a bit too simple in that sense.

And just to make it clear, I'm posting this from my Ubuntu laptop. I've been running Linux exclusively for around 5 years (non-exclusively for around 8), so I'm far from an MS fanboy. I just think with all the reasons there are for critisising MS and Windows, there's no reason to make this just another "Windows is insecure" story.

pop culture today is primarily a technology story

Is it really? I think the problem is that we want it to be. Lester Bangs wrote about rock. Rock would not exist withoug electric guitar, tape recorder and analog amplifier. Could Lester Bangs fix a broken tape recorder? Was he a great critic because he understood how a guitar works? No. He wrote about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. I see crisis in videogame criticism precisely in the fact that there are too many technofetish geeks covering it. We read too many reviews focusing on technical details - what 3D engine was used, how many frames per second you get in given resolution, what are the system requirements etc. We read too few focusing on the storyline, character development or the background information. It's like art criticism focusing only on chemical composition of the paint used by the painter. Ever since Gutenberg, culture ALWAYS was a technology story, but what we need now are critics writing about stories and meanings, not about the 3D engines, pixels and frames per second.