Sharing The Pain

Last year, Microsoft produced a very popular video called We Share Your Pain, where they describe a Microsoft Quality Assurance program where their employees are properly motivated to not cause problems by writing problem code.

The program (regrettably mythical) includes a rather special desk chair used by Microsoft employees. The chair would punish the employee, who writes the defective code, in several possible ways. One way, demonstrated by the engineer of the chair, would involve

2 needles, released from the bottom of the chair, into the fleshly part of the buttocks

unorthodox, but effective - it's more people related

This month, we learn that even Steve Ballmer felt the pain once. He tried to cleanup an infected computer, unsuccessfully. Even a crack team of Microsoft engineers could not clean up this computer.

According to the teller of the tale, Jim Allchin, the brilliant mind behind Windows Vista and Windows XP,

Ballmer eventually gave up and instead lugged the machine back to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus. There, several engineers spent several days, burrowing deep into the system to figure out the problem. Imagine, CSI: Redmond.

It turns out there were more than a hundred pieces of malware of various types. Things that these engineers using Microsoft's own private tools could not ferret out and fix.

There are many points to this tale. Most will say that it merely indicates that malware is out of control. Those folks would be wrong.

The point here is that, if you depend upon periodically cleaning up your computer, you are wasting your time. Eventually, cleaning up your computer won't work. Some malware is written to protect itself from being removed.

The best way to not share the pain, or ever feel the pain, is to protect your computer. Keep malware off your computer, and your network. Layer Your Security. That's the answer.