Robert L. Harris wrote: > You'd think within 12 days people would figure out how to download and > install a service pack. Kinda scary how long this has been going on > in the first place.
Indeed. The basic problem, I think (not that this is anything terribly revelatory), is that the Internet is really not a safe place for people who don't understand computers well enough to protect themselves, and Microsoft has never really made security their primary concern. Not that they're alone in that; a default Red Hat Linux installation runs all kinds of potentially vulnerable services that the average home user doesn't understand or need. (Nor is Red Hat the only distro with this problem. Even Debian, which is more conservative than most in this regard, includes telnetd, fingerd, and identd among the "standard" packages. My machines run none of these, but only because I went out of my way to remove them.) My feeling is that the default workstation configuration for any OS should have _no_ open ports. No web server, no mail server (just an MTA configured only for outbound use via the command line), no ftpd, no telnetd, no sshd, no fingerd, no identd, no file or printer sharing, X11 services configured for local use only, etc., etc., etc. If the user wants these things, s/he should have to actively select them one by one. Not that this is any guarantee that the user will know how to manage them, but it's better than installing everything by default in the inane goal of giving the user a "feature-packed" system. Craig
