Topic created on: August 31, 2006 21:16 CDT by OpsMan .

Hello Brothers, and Sisters.

Hadn't been real active on the forums lately. Reasearching and cathing up on some much needed reading.

It seems so many software vendors put such effort into software anti-reversing/cracking and so little in security. No surprise to many of you I'm sure for the almighty dollar/euro rules. When does it become so ridiculous that the customers demand accountability. As a patron of some really usefull software it baffles/eludes any logical thinking that my money is used to legaly use the not so bug free software. Furthermore my dollar is used against my own attempts to repair such mistakes (conflicts with other programs, crashing altogther, and just freezing up at times) while at the same time I could be allowing someone to infect my system by some stupid vulneraility.

Taking a look at some of the listed vulnerabilities on securityfocus it's astounding. For example, ZoneAlarm is widely used and although you can use it free, the paid program versions suffer from the same vulnerabilities. Now there are several applications with such stupid coding mistakes. I'm not picking on just ZoneAlarm.

So my question is why is it so acceptable for customers to accept such mistakes? I know , you just download the updated patch when such mistakes are reported. I'm damn glad auto companies don't operate like that. And if these vulnerablities are an ever present part of software then why not make it easier for me to correct such mistakes myself and not spend hours of unpacking, decrypting, and debugging.

I guess the Open Source community has the right attitude and we should all support them both with our code and our money.

OpsMan.