Some of you have noticed that our black list of spammers doesn’t work at the moment. If you want to hack these IPs at the moment, just email us from our contact form and we’ll email you the ACCESS file. Meanwhile, here is what happened.
The black list is kept on a local database on our Windows 2000 system and it drives a MySQL database on the Linux host using a MySQL driver 3.51. We recently updated our Windows 2000 SP3 to SP4 and got all those security fixes installed. Now the SQL driver doesn’t work. Yep, I uninstalled the driver and ACCESS and re-installed both. The error message when we try comes from ACCESS is that the OBDC call failed. It use to work. No additional messages. The system is a Dell workstation. Dell has no clue as to what happened. It is, of course, a Microsoft problem. Microsoft wants $245 dollars to tell me what happened. That’s more than my Windows 2000 cost. And what they will probably tell me for $245 is to reformat my disk and reload Windows and all my programs. (Yes, our data is all backed up.) I’m willing to bet the register is corrupt and that is the problem.
Do you want to know why Microsoft has all the security problems that it does? It isn’t the number of Windows systems out there, but rather the register design. Vista won’t help Microsoft unless they are serious about fixing Windows, and Microsoft has lost trust on that.
Summary
To quote Cringely from the 1/9/2006 issue of Infoworld:
Desktop Linux is looking more attractive every day.
Our host system is a Linux. We couldn’t afford to run our web site on a host that crashes like Windows does. At the desktop level, Microsoft is now competing with Linux, Apple (now using Intel processor chips), and soon GoogleDos. Why should I have to pay for a Microsoft problem, such as my ACCESS problem?
The answer, I would think, would be for Windows’ users to rise up with a class action suite. This was suggested in Inforworld 1/9 by Dave Rosenberg. When do Windows’ users get compensated for Microsoft’s mistakes?
Meanwhile, we are loading the SQL driver onto another system and hope to have the black list up again soon. Our responsibility is to our clients first, so this is considered non-productive and may take some time yet. Please be patient or ask us to email the database. We’ve sent a printout to the FTC, but the Administration and the FTC are pretty dead the next few years.