One of many goes on trial

Some get betrayed, others get MBEs and invites to Live 8.

German Sven Jaschan may escape all too severe consequences for authoring and spreading the Sasser worm whilst one of his former friends sits cozily with $250,000 given by Microsoft in an attempt to spin attention away from the company's obvious culpability and others aren't even charged.

Sasser broke in May 2004 on the four year anniversary of the Love Bug which also exploited idiotic holes in the Redmond giant's excuse for professional software.

The Love Bug was the first major worm outbreak on the web and those responsible for networks were that time and that time alone given the benefit of the doubt. After the Love Bug, there was no longer any excuse for using Microsoft 'technology'.

Jaschan was technically a juvenile when he wrote and released Sasser, so his trial, expected to take a mere three days, will be behind closed doors.

German authorities will be calling a broadcaster and three government departments to testify to the disruption the worm caused.

No one is scheduled to ask these people how they could be so irresponsible as to use Microsoft products in the first place.

The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency were also taken offline by Sasser - because they were irresponsible and used substandard Microsoft products four years after the devastation of the Love Bug - which should have told even turnips Mister Bill's stuff is a rip-off.

Even British Airways had issues, as they too are irresponsible and did not abandon Windows as they were aware they should have.

Likewise Australian Railcorp, another agency people today know they cannot trust because of their abysmal judgement and irresponsibility in securing their computerised operations.

Taiwan's postal system also came to a halt for the same reason.

Sasser was inventive in that it did not rely on social engineering: it exploited one of the countless inexcusable programming errors in Microsoft products.

Although Microsoft released a patch for the Sasser hole a month earlier, many networks refused to use the patch, as Microsoft's track record in supplying patches that did not further cripple people's computers and computer networks had been egregiously less than stellar.

At time of writing William H 'Mister Bill' Gates 3 is still on free foot and has not yet been brought up on charges in any country on the planet for being the 'cause primaire' of communications breakdown world wide.

Nor have any of those responsible for keeping Microsoft products despite dire warnings of the dangers been fired, sued, or arraigned as they should be.