An image, courtesy of the Register, of Microsoft crashing the information screens at Baker Street on the London Underground. The crash is due to a nasty little piece of spyware called iexplore.exe.

Looks familiar, doesn’t it? How many times have you seen a touchscreen in a public place, a tourist destination, an official kiosk of some sort, that’s been knocked out by some impenetrable Windows crash? The staff, of course, have no idea how to restart it — and so there it remains, a blot on the landscape, an affront to 21st century civilization, a thumb-to-the-nose at the dream of effortless touchscreening in modern life. The parasitical spyware wins.

You’d never see a dumb-ass crash like this on a Linux or Mac machine, of course. But there’s still no mass-market version of Linux that’s simple enough for London Underground workers to not freak out around, and of course Apple would never sully its hands with something so base and anonymous as a public touchscreen. And so we sally forth into the future, the world running on an outdated OS. But one day, inevitably, the tide of history will wipe this arrogant, corrupt code off the face of the planet.

Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Future Boy)