The RSOD and challenging responses

By Mark Gibbs, Network World, 05/23/05

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First up this week: The Red Screen of Death. "Hold hard!" we hear you mutter, "surely you mean the Blue Screen of Death?" Nope, red it is, at least currently where Longhorn is concerned.

In his blog, Michael Kaplan, a "Technical Lead from Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts, and Tools at Microsoft," notes that he was messing around with a Longhorn beta and after doing something evil to the registry and booting under Virtual PC, he got the fabulously ungrammatical and totally unhelpful message, "Info: An error occurred transferring execution" (yes, it really was spelled that way) on a screen with a red background!

Kaplan notes, "I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement." Never was a truer word spoken. We hope that Mr. Kaplan is flying beneath the executive radar at Microsoft, otherwise he may well be going down in flames.

According to Microsoft droids, this display will not be included in the release version of Longhorn, but as reader Jack Miller, who brought this amusing diversion to our attention, points out: "Early versions of DOS had better error messages . . . but it seems Microsoft is going the wrong way. I can only conclude this is a planned journey to make users more dependent on Microsoft and increase their stronghold on the market. . . . That's why I'm rooting for Linux."

But that isn't all readers have been writing in about. Morely Dotes was the first to write in after our recent brief discussion of an anti-spam product called Qurb.

Dotes, which is not his real name for reasons that are unlikely to be cleared up here, disagrees with the challenge/response methodology Qurb uses: "I don't suppose it ever crossed your mind that [challenge/response] systems reduce your spam problem by offloading it onto unwilling strangers, did it? People who use [challenge/response] systems are, inevitably, spammers themselves."

What Morely means is that challenging a message from a spammer who uses a false address will result in the challenge request going to an innocent bystander, the real owner of the abused address.

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