[PappaPatat]

I would like to say thank you to him, since it opened a huge budget and mandate for my security team at the time.

No more draining discussion if AV needed to be installed on particular systems, the right to wipe any employees desk or laptop in case of "issues", create outbound firewall rules (yes those where new, and yes it saved a lot of damage 3 years later when Slammer hit, but that's another story) and budget to install "monitoring services" on whatever we'd like.

The total data loss was limited, the costs of employees not being able to work was a lot worst.

[MithrilTuxedo]

I guess that at the height of Windows market saturation.

I thought it was rude to pay for an OS and then have to pay separately for software to protect that OS. It seemed off to me that the guy who wrote Melissa got jail time, but nothing happened to those who sold the software needed to run viruses.

I stopped having Windows installed after Slammer hit. After almost two decades away, I got a job at a big American company that issues Windows laptops and lo-and-behold there's some seperately purchsed AV software installed.

It makes the laptop a space heater. If I don't explicitly shut it down, the AV software never drops below 30% CPU and the thing's fans never stop running. They accidentally dropped AV for a couple weeks when they upgraded my machine from Windows 7 to 10 and it shaved five minutes off a ~17 minute Maven build. I'm one employ of tens or hundreds of thousands producing all this extraneous waste heat.

My friends needle me about BitCoin's environmental impact. I ask them what the overhead of AV has been.

[notechback]

The comparison of bitcoin Vs AV energy usage is a bit ridiculous. No one of buying hundreds of GPUs to mine AV.

That said, both are wasteful and ultimately neither should exist.

[LordDragonfang]

>No one of buying hundreds of GPUs to mine AV

No, rather companies are buying thousands of computers to install AV on.

Bitcoin miners are a actually a very small minority of computer users, whereas AV results in an extra 10-30% power overhead (possibly more, if we factor in that modern cpus throttle way down if not under load) for the majority of all the corporate PCs in operation, to say nothing of home users.

Back of the napkin math suggests that the comparison is indeed ridiculous, but only because AV usage absolutely dwarfs bitcoin usage.

[dzhiurgis]

My pet peeve is VP9 on YouTube vs Chrome on MacOS. My original estimate lack of codec on MacOS / YouTube's choice to drop x264 for high resolution videos waste as much power as entire country Puerto Rico.

It's even impossible to play 8K YouTube videos on highest end MacBook and Chrome. It's ironic that MKBHD uploading them without being able to play them himself.

[waste_monk]

Wait until you hear about web browsers...

[Tuna-Fish]

> The comparison of bitcoin Vs AV energy usage is a bit ridiculous. No one of buying hundreds of GPUs to mine AV.

No, but they run almost everywhere.

I'd be very surprised if bitcoin mining produces even 1% of the CO2 emissions of what AV software does. Mostly because the reward from mining has been competed so low that if you have to pay normal amounts for electricity, it's nowhere near profitable, so mining mostly happens in places with very low electricity prices, such as towns in China near hydroelectric dams with massive excess production.

[a1369209993]

Sometime last year, someone had writeup where they worked out that buying enough gas (I forget if "natural" or "-oline") to mine 1 bitcoin, ignoring fixed costs like the generator or GPU, would cost them ~1.2 BTC. That might change if you live near a oil well/refinery/coal mine, but I'd kinda like to see a statistical analysis of whether bitcoin time-between-blocks varies with time of day based on which areas have excess solar power.

[dzhiurgis]

I keep wondering can you design a solar panel that uses photonic bitcoin mining. That would be ridiculously efficient.

[eli]

If you want to make money with solar seems like it’d be a lot easier to just sell the electricity back into the grid

[autonoshitbox]

Only until everyone else has them too

[vanderZwan]

Honestly, we probably should be grateful that this was the first big scare. It was a huge outbreak, but at the same time a very visible and relatively benign worm.

[bartread]

Exactly. Compared with what organised crime, nation states, political organisations, special interest groups and some shady companies are doing with hacking, manipulation, worms, and botnets nowadays this is pretty benign. A helpful wakeup call to everyone to take security more seriously, in fact.

[pedrocr]

> The total data loss was limited, the costs of employees not being able to work was a lot worst.

The productivity costs of all those mitigating measures shouldn't be ignored either. Modern corporate Windows images are incredible in how much CPU and RAM they can waste even at idle.

[dzhiurgis]

It's probably shit metric as my two browsers open now use 10GB of RAM on MacOS, but Windows 10 requires 2-4x less minimum RAM to run when compared with latest Ubuntu...

[pedrocr]

The problem isn't Windows. It's all the third-party stuff that gets added to Windows by corporate IT departments.

[JoeAltmaier]

Well, any given holiday keeps workers from working. I don't value that as much as some folks. We all got a day off!

But it was certainly a wake-up call. And such a simple trick, to fool the world in a day.