Eric Rostetter wrote:
> Knowingly disabling running software on computers that is not your own
is not acceptable. It is immoral, unethical and perhaps illegal.
But that's not what happened.
Yes, it is what happened... People are just confused because of all
the bogus complaints like "they shutdown my server" or "they shutdown
my email". But they did indeed shutdown clamd for some set of older
versions.
I'm confused - are you saying they did, or didn't shut down software
that people were running on their servers ? I think you are admitting
(thank you) that the update did what it was supposed to do and
remotely stopped some versions of ClamAV from running.
The **ONLY** defence I can think of is that they assumed an
implicit permission by virtue of the user running the update
process to fetch signature updates. That's a very tenuous thing to
infer when pushing an update that is so different in purpose to
what would normally be fetched.
Well, since you pull the updates (they are not pushed to you), and since
while this one signature was indeed "different in purpose" than the normal,
you have a point. But, this "different in purpose" signature was just
a way of warning that soon the "same in purpose" signatures _would_ stop
the software. Would you rather they just started pushing the "normal in
purpose signatures" that crashed it, or that they pushed a "different
in purpose" one first, where the "purpose" was to notify users of both
the issue, and how to fix it?
They didn't HAVE to push either to the older software - I'm not the
first to point out that there was a completely viable alternative
that would just stop supplying updates to the older software.
So my preference would be simply that they "did nothing" to my
software. If they want to stop supporting it with updates, that's
fine and it still leaves me in control of what I run and when I
update it.
--
Simon Hobson
Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.
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