What's this button here do?

Windows XP will make Internet unstable - top security expert

In the above article, Steve Gibson claims that Windows XP threatens to make the Internet unstable. Apparently, the problem lies in allowing people to launch uncontrollable denial-of-service attacks to whichever IP address they see fit.

Fahd Arshad has a point to make about such operability:

No offense to Mr. Gibson - I don't consider myself in a position to offend someone of his standing anyway - but the argument he makes is rather odd. One of Microsoft's attitudes that has come under fire repeatedly is their patronizing the common user a.k.a. the Win9x owner etc.

Their security model often simply blocks users from doing things Microsoft considers they aren't "responsible enough to handle". As a CS student who needs flexibility in computing, this does irk me sometimes, but I also understand that most users that I have come across as a lab and residential computer consultant, no offense to them, need just that because if their computers were any more complicated than a microwave to operate, they would either be confused or give up on them altogether, not because they are dumb but because of the aura of mystique that surrounds computers. I digress.

My point was that Mr. Gibson seems to be advocating a similar role for application developers: develop for the "real" users, and develop for everyone else. Not that I believe that's a completely wrong argument, but I'd be interested to know what Mr. Gibson and all the other punters think of crippling the consumer version of the OS... MS would have to, considering Win2000 and XP are going to share the same code base.

Does anyone know if WinXP has instructions on how to operate our office microwave? The coffee's gone cold...