On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 14:34, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > . Windows suffers from viruses more than > Apple OSes and other Unix spin-offs not because it represents an > inferior OS but because Windows is more popular with users (who are > admittedly mostly corporate).
I disagree. Unix and its derivatives like Linux are secure by design, in the sense that both are multi-user OS(s), so user accounts do not have full access to the system to do damage and overwrite system files. The Windows family of OSs, on the other hand, are single-user operating systems, and multi-user capabilities came very late on the OS life and evolution, and even while there were primitive multi-user accounts, most WinXP systems out there are run with a single account. Only in "Vista" MSFT came out with a series of warning screens and locked features that required "administrator" access and confirmation before making changes to the system... ie the dreaded "UAC" (User Account Control). Users responded to the "annoyance" by... disabling it http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm Win7 lowered the number of "annoyances" to the end user while trying to keep as much of the Vista security infrastructure in place. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446675%28WS.10%29.aspx "Before the introduction of User Account Control (UAC), when a user was logged on as an administrator, that user was automatically granted full access to all system resources. While running as an administrator enabled a user to install legitimate software, the user could also unintentionally or intentionally install a malicious program. A malicious program installed by an administrator can fully compromise the computer and affect all users." "Reduced number of UAC prompts Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 reduce the number of UAC prompts that local administrators and standard users must respond to. " Yet, still, it´s a user-education (or lack thereof) problem, as most users learned to click "yes, yes, yes, I agree" to every prompt that gets in the way of doing something done, so UAC is still seen as an "annoyance" and some still disable it, even in Win7 http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-disable-and-turn-off-uac-in-windows-7/ If you don´t take my word about this seriously, you can also read this, which tells the same story more nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control FC -- "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." Richard Hamming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
