On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 21:49, Charlie M. wrote: > I bash the writer because I see his article as an attack on anyone that holds > the view that Windows is insecure by design, and his alluding to the fact > that those of us stating the opposite about GNU/Linux are idiots. > > While I agree with your analysis that much of the burden is on users, I don't > agree with much else that author wrote. I've never told anyone that GNU/Linux > was invulnerable, one of his "facts;" but I often tell people that it's a > hell of a lot easier to secure, and to keep secure, than Windows has ever > been. > > If you thought the quote from my grandfather was directed strictly at the > author of the "rebuttal" read it again. Specifically in the light of what I > said about users before that quote. > > Other than that I'm forced to respectfully agree to disagree with you that the > author even had a point. > > Other than the ones on his head. (-:
He did make a couple of valid point, although he doesn't make them very well, and they don't really rebut the article he's addressing. One, as Linux becomes more popular on the desktop, the temptation to "dump it down" becomes very strong. I've never used Lindows, but I understand that it's default install is quite unsecure and even uses root as the default user. (I believe this was mentioned in the original article.) This doesn't negate the security advantage Linux has over Windows, but it definitely narrows the gap. Second, patches to fix the vulnerabilities exploited by the recent worms have been available for quite awhile. Normal users don't patch their systems. As Linux becomes more common, the number of unsecure systems out there will increase, which means we will see an increases in the number of Linux exploits in the wild. They won't be as numerous as Windows exploits, because the *nix architecture exposes fewer hooks, but they will come.
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