On Jul 6, 2013, at 6:46 AM, Rudolf Leitgeb <[email protected]> wrote:
> Use OpenBSD if you want to keep out the common criminal but don't fool > yourself that you can outwit three letter agencies with your laptops. Too many people, especially the paranoid security types, fail at basic cost / benefit analysis. Randall Munroe put it quite well, as usual: http://xkcd.com/538/ OpenBSD won't protect you from a $5 wrench -- or from a $150,000 / year ``consultant'' planting old-fashioned bugs in your home, let alone court-approved wiretaps or a FISA warrant. It will, though, reasonably keep you safe from network attacks, much more so than the popular commercial alternatives. (In fairness, the vigilant reactionary approach the big vendors have taken seems to be working ``well enough'' in practice for most people, though it's an awful lot of effort that could be put to better use.) But that's not why I like OpenBSD. I like OpenBSD because it's the only Unix that's reasonably coherent and sensical. OpenBSD's security record is just icing on the cake, and it's a side-effect of the team's insistence on writing good code. Get the fundamentals right, don't compromise your coding standards just to finish a task, always loop back to look for rough spots and polish them out, and everything else just takes care of itself. Cheers, b&
