said by RockyBB:The takeaway of the story is that the bad guys were stopped, but consider the mess in the meantime.
I think that's an incorrect comparison for 2 reasons:
1) The web hosting company was well known problem for a long time. Upstream providers nor the government would take action. It took the threat of a newspaper story to get the upstream providers to shut down the hosting company, which hosted sites that controlled the remote bot-infected computers.
2) There's a big difference between a general knowledge that some people are infected with something, from someone they have no knowledge of interacting with, and news that a specific software product is conducting malicious activity.
For example, when it became known that Sears/AOL/Prodigy (whatever it was called back in '91) was scanning customer computers, uploading results to the server, it was very clear who was affected.
Your suggestions about MJ's "potential" to go malevolent could apply to any software maker/product. It's a valid warning concerning anything anyone runs. But, there's nothing specific about MJ to warrant concern.
The lack of an uninstall feature probably has more to do with the fact that very few people are animated about it. (Only one person is animated as much as you are.).
- They don't hide (or obfuscate) their software.
- They tell people how to uninstall it.
- They don't run as a daemon (meaning it requires the user to execute the software for it to run, and thus it doesn't run if they stop using it, but don't remove it.).
As mentioned earlier, if they provided an uninstall program you probably wouldn't trust it. You'd claim that it's a sign of their intent to "mislead" their customers. "Someday.... they'll disable it, or not uninstall one component, and, voila!, you've been turned into a zombie"
As long as readers aren't misled, I'm ok with your hypothesis.
Mark