On 2003.10.06 15:04 John Hebert wrote: > Unadulterated and well-deserved Micro$oft bashing: > > > Linux vs. Windows Viruses > > To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, > you just need to work on it. > > By Scott Granneman Oct 02 2003 10:59AM PT > > We've all heard it many times when a new Microsoft virus comes out. In fact, > I've heard it a couple of times this week already. Someone on a mailing list > or discussion forum complains about the latest in a long line of Microsoft > email viruses or worms and recommends others consider Mac OS X or Linux as a > somewhat safer computing platform. In response, another person named, oh, > let's call him "Bill," says, basically, "How ridiculous! The only reason > Microsoft software is the target of so many viruses is because it is so > widely used! Why, if Linux or Mac OS X was as popular as Windows, there > would be just as many viruses written for those platforms!" > > ... > > http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/188 > > > John Hebert >
Why is this "bashing"? Everything he says is true. It's really a nice summary of good security practices that can be read and understood by the average clueful user. Microsoft's practices have and continue to fall fall short of what they should be. Comparing two things that are roughly equivalent, Ford and GMC trucks say, and advocating one offer the other by denigrating the other is bashing. Detailing the differences in two things where one is clearly superior is a simple description. The effectiveness of Microsoft's advertising, overt and covert, is amazing. The whole term and concept of "Microsoft Bashing" is a great example. It sounds bad but has no specific meaning, yet all of us have been exposed to the term. It comes to mind whenever any of us has a negative thought about Microsoft or describes yet another negative experience with their software. Me telling this group that XP might not work when you change out the motherboard with an identical motherboard and certainly won't work with a new processor could be viewed as Microsoft Bashing. Such a mind set is debilitating. I've mostly picket the term up from Slashdot and other places that Microsoft pays people to write like trade mags. This kind of thought molding is far more effective than any silly five page spread in National Geographic that promises XP will make you superman. Influencing the influential is one of the primary means of keeping people hooked into Windoze, no matter how horrible the eXPerience becomes. It's hard to brag about the virtues of free software without mentioning Microsoft's many shortcomings. Even in an area where free software is so clearly superior, like networking, you have to intimately know the Microsoft user's experience to describe how free software is better. For browsers, I like to tell people who ask me how to block annoying and sometimes pornographic popups to use Mozilla. This, of course, is not enough because the average user also has been taken over by malware such as Gator and might be running multiple messaging systems which are abused regularly. The Microsoft web experience is one long chain of popups which obscure all content. Many of them are simply offensive and people with small children become afraid to turn their computers on with the children in the same room, much less give them a computer of their own. The only way to tell such users that free software does not suffer this way is to know and get them to enumerate the nasty sfuff they deal with. Networking software is only the tip of the iceberg. There are similar comparisons that can be made between free and M$ mail clients, GUI's, compilers, hardware drivers and, well, everything.
