It’s become kinda fashionable to blog about what you think societies biggest issues are. I’m not an expert on society, but I do know a bit about the internet community. so, here goes

Fonts

Font’s that aren’t installed, font’s that are installed but aren’t antialiased, font’s that are installed, are antialiased but are the wrong size. Documents that rely on some font that isn’t installed on this machine. Operating systems that have different standard fonts that looks like they are different sizes (even if they are the same size). Font’s that are missing glyphs, font’s that are inaccessible so your rxvt’s hang on startup. Font’s that have patents preventing you from rendering them properly. Fonts that have indistiguishable charactors (|Il1, O0o). Font’s where you just don’t knowwtf is going on

NAT

Network address translation. It’s evil. It should be taken away. People think that it gives them protection from the internet. How every wrong they are. It breaks almost everything out there, except for perhaps HTTP and POP3. If people want to do NAT then that’s their choice, but they shouldn’t force it upon those of us that need to avoid it. The only reason that the Internet hasn’t run out of addresses is that it’s become so difficult to get multiple IP’s that people use NAT instead. It’s sad, since IPv6 has a solution to this problem. Sigh. And firewalls are a bogus idea too

Insecure software

Now I must admit I’m guilty of this one too. However people that distribute operating systems need to learn a few simple rules:

• No ports should be opened by default. Ever. If a user wants it open, they should open it themselves. Thus if they didn’t know about it, it’s not running. If they do know about it, then they should know enough to update it.
• Don’t run content from untrusted hosts. You have to be rutheless these days, if it doesn’t exactly conform to the specifications, IT MUST NOT BE TRUSTED. This is the complete opposite of being permissive in what you recieve, and strict on what you send.