Yesterday, Paul Lussier gleaned this insight:
> Currently this is true, at least for Netscape. What happens in the future
> when the current Windows App development companies start shipping their
> prodicts for Windows? What happens when MS is forcibly broken up, and they
> start shipping Office/Outlook for Linux?
Currently, you run Linux, because you recognize that MS products have
serious issues. Do you plan to change your mind suddenly when MS releases
Outlook for Linux? I didn't think so...
> Not true. The devastating aspect of ILOVEYOU and Melissa was that it
> replicated itself via e-mail and mailed itself to everyone in a persons
> addressbook or corporate LDAP directory. A simple perl script, auto executed
> could have severely damaging consequences. True, the most it could do is
> delete the users own files, but what if the user owns files across a wide
> array of NFS mounted partitions? Consider a perl or shell script which
> figures out the where the home directory of the user is, backs up to the
> parent directory, performs a "find ./ -iregex '.*address.*' -print"
> and then starts mailing itself to every e-mail address contained within any of
> those found files.
Well, if you choose to turn such a feature on, I'll have little sympathy
for you when this happens. I might even consider "accidentally" losing
the backup tapes that have your files on them... You'll probably figure
out fairly quickly that you shouldn't have that crap on.
> Or, just starts scouring the system for files with common file extensions and
> mails that stuff off to the writer of the virus?
>
> Granted, this is currently tough to do under Unix, but wait a couple of years
> until more commercial apps are available, and common sense and security take
> second seat to time to market and generating revenue. It could easily happen.
I don't think it will happen so easily. Unix people have had 30 years to
figure out that lots of people just aren't as nice as they ought to be...
ultimately it's current Unix people who will be teaching the future Unix
people, so that lesson will get passed on. You learned it, didn't you?
Plus, let's not forget that most people who run Linux on their PC
do so because they find MS apps unsatisfactory, and often the nature of
that which they find lacking is security and stability. I don't think
people will be flocking in droves to run microsoft apps on Linux any time
soon.
And sure, other vendors have issues, but none are so glaring and prevalent
as those in microsoft products. They're by far the worst in my
experience.
> >Added all up, that's a whole lot of dumbness that someone would have to
> >ACTIVELY CHOSE before major damage could be done. Now, it could easily
> >find ways to send itself to other people, but unless they're all stupid
> >too, that's where it would end.
>
> You're only considering Netscape here, let's not forget that IE *HAS*
> been ported to Unix! Just wait. Linux/Unix will get hit with
> something like this, and then MS's PR machine is going to be all over
> it.
If it happens any time soon, it will most probably be a MS app that did
it. I doubt they'll be all over it.
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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