Security specialist Steve Gibson has created quite a fracas with his increasingly vocal opposition to the raw-socket connectivity planned for Windows-XP, and upon which he bases predictions of impending chaos for the entire Internet, so he's decided to exploit the very threat he claims will make the Internet permanently unstable.. . .
Security specialist Steve Gibson has created quite a fracas with his increasingly vocal opposition to the raw-socket connectivity planned for Windows-XP, and upon which he bases predictions of impending chaos for the entire Internet, so he's decided to exploit the very threat he claims will make the Internet permanently unstable.

The raw sockets which have Gibson so steamed enable a machine to send or capture data independent of the operating system -- quite handy if you're a software developer or an advanced hobbyist. And while it's true that this also enhances the packet-flooding capabilities of a Windows machine by making it easy to spoof packets, it's also true that this function is already included in most other operating systems, and can be added to an existing Win-9x, 'ME, or '2K machine quite easily with a library called WinPcap.

All right, we'll allow that there'll be a few s'kiddies who might prefer to use their Win-XP boxes for such purposes. But they can already do so simply by installing Linux and doing a bit of reading.

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