Meanwhile, in geek news, George Ou paints Robert Cringely as a fool or worse for his lack of knowledge of the issues addressed by IPv6 in "Robert Cringely shows blatant ignorance of networking". The link contains the article that sparked George to smack down Robert. Here's a sample:

"As for your comments on NAC, you're sounding like a crackpot conspiracy theorist lunatic. NAC has absolutely nothing to do with charging for every PC in your house, it is an optional technology for corporate LANs. There is no secret plan to put an 802.1x NAC capable switch on to your home network. If anything, moving away from NAT and on to IPv6 would allow ISPs to see how many devices you have in the home and potentially charge you for every device on your home. As it stands now, the ISP can only see the single IPv4 address on your personal router."

While George is scathingly correct in his fisking of Robert, after reading Robert's original article and George's response, I'm reminded of this.

Like uncountable thousands of Windows users, I have been testing Windows Vista on a backup machine and using that platform to test IE 7. Sparked by a nasty virus/trojan/bho infection that I acquired by recovering files for a friend from his seemingly lost hard drive, I decided to test Firefox 2 on my production machine.

The scales have been lifted; I see clearly now. Download Firefox 2, make it your default browser, and put your browser troubles behind you. Click on the Firefox download button conveniently located in the left column of this blog to protect yourself from all too many nasty exploits and vulnerabilities in IE 6.

BTW, it took the better part of three full days to regain full confidence that my machine was clean again, despite the measures that I had taken prior to the infection. In a later post, I will explain the tools that I used to clean my machine and the new measures that I have taken to protect my production environment in addition to switching to Firefox 2.