There are few people I have *less* respect for than this asshat. THE rule of nix systems is: create software that does one thing but does it perfectly. Instead, he created malware and a virus and a system that's a solution searching for a problem. Just asinine from stem to stern.

In the first Internet company I was a partner in, we named all of our servers after gods, typically Norse, but when we ran out of names we branched out into gods of other national origin.

Then we bought a Dell.

It was big. Really big. It took more power than three or four of the other servers we owned that were of roughly equivalent power.

Certainly it wasn't worthy of being named after a god, even a demi-god. We had a bona fide problem on our hands.

There we sat in the programming lab, drinking too much coffee, trying to unravel the mystery of what to name this gigantic ugly purplish / brownish server.

One of the DBAs, taking a pull from his coffee, smiled knowingly, and said, "Fat Bastard," turned around and left the room.

It was so obviously the perfect name... it was as if it had named itself. And thus Fat Bastard was born.

This is social engineering at its finest - an untrusted source, launching executable code (via user action) and gaining elevated privileges (via user input of password).

Not only is it all of the above, it's also doing so (thus far) without the ability to automatically compromise secondary hosts, as many Windows worms and malware do.

Also, don't steal software. You're just asking for trouble. This isn't the first time that OS X has been targeted with dodgy copies of software from download sites.

While getting a worm/trojan/virus/malware on your computer is always a crappy outcome, as far as many of the companies and software developers who're trying to make an honest buck (and keep their employees working) are concerned, if you're trying to steal their software and you get malware instead, you got what you paid for.

I'll be first in line to support open source; I'll also be first in line to pay for software from companies that make good software. If you want a product and it costs money, buy it. If you can't afford it, consider an open source alternative or do without. Otherwise, as you so succinctly put it: "untrusted code could do anything."

I've been following MS's solution, and the problem is it's limited to Office documents. There's already a good solution for document monitoring from Awareness Technologies, and their solution isn't limited to just Office docs.

AFAIR, it can also keep track of USB drives and such, too.

and as we all know, beeswax and ear wax *are* both chemical free. ;-)

It's not just the herbal = good, it's the level of BS so prevalent in much of it. What cracked me up recently was a label on a Burt's Bees product.

"Chemical free" the label touts. Errrrrrrrrrrrrruh???

Stop me if I'm going too fast, but if it really is "chemical free" what's in it?

Somehow a lot of people *still* think that just because it's a pill and is FDA approved it's "safe" and can't cause harm elsewhere in the body.

The Vioxx fiasco is proof that prescription drugs can and are _very_ dangerous.

Much like the warnings on cigarette pack labels, it seems like the warnings about prescription drugs are often outright ignored or unheeded. When not ignored or unheeded, many people have the, "It's not like that could happen to *me*..." syndrome and are in outright denial about the dangers.