Ah, another (Mac)Country heard from. Cool. Dave Henn wrote:
[big snip of stuff from others] > One way to nearly eliminate malware is to do away with Windows once > and for all, or to demand that MS overhaul it so that the malware > can't take advantage of its security holes. There is little, if any, > malware for Unix-based OSs, such as Mac OS X and the various Linuxes > (Linuxi?), and what there is requires the user to give it permission > to run. Unix has been around a long time and is installed on millions > of servers, yet no malware of significance. Microsoft Windows is much > younger, but has thousands and thousands of viruses, Trojans, and > other nasties. > Welll... I agree completely about security holes in MS-based software. There is so awfully much of it, and so much of it written by "software professionals" who wouldn't know a buffer overrun if it bit them in the a**. Not so much the Microsoft people themselves, but many of the vast community of others who write commercial software for that platform. But: the fact of its sheer volume also speaks to its sweeping global acceptance. Again, convenience is an addiction. Now, I don't agree about eliminating malware by killing Windows. Malware goes where the opportunities appear for it. If they are overwhelmingly on Windows, that's where the opportunities are. Ask anyone who runs a more-obscure browser and not IE and Outlook -- not that many exploits with the rarely-used stuff. The exploits are almost all aimed at the heavily-used applications. That's where the money is, as Willie Sutton said. So if we abolish Windows, we simply drive everyone, followed closely by the malware parasites, off to whatever platform they choose. And that's when we will find the same dismal truth confronting us once more. I love good, easy-to-use, beautifully-designed systems like Mac OS and its descendants. But the scaling up to the numbers of users (and the richness of function) that Windows carries every day will reveal the same kind of underlying stresses and weaknesses. They've just never been stressed at the level Windows has. And don't get me started on the Unix system and its variants. Talk about a priesthood! I worked with these guys for a long time, and they're great, but even I could do naughty things on a Unix system without half trying. I think "no malware of significance" is too general -- there is a lot of Unix malware, but it doesn't get talked about. Make friends with a Unix sysadmin who has security to do, and that person will tell you what will make the hair on your head stand on end and turn pale. I'm a pessimist about software perfection, and an optimist about software survival. The only reason we still use computers, I think, is that they are as fast at undoing the messes they make as they are at making them. When the world gets mad enough at the malware makers, the world will do something about them. Same old story. > That wouldn't do away with the spam, but it would reduce malware > threats to tens instead of tens of thousands. > See above. > Acceptance is the problem, again. While Ubuntu is helping bring lesser > geeks and even non-geeks into the Linux world, and the Vista problems > urged people to look at alternatives like Mac OS X and Linux, there is > still a huge amount of inertia confronting any massive OS change, not > to mention the economic incentive millions of techies have to stand in > the way of a truly secure OS. > Yes on inertia - the inertia translates into huge amounts of money for changeovers. The system administrators I know shudder at even the small-scale upgrades and service pack installations on hundreds of machines. What would they need in the budget for an OS migration? They're in deep enough trouble fighting with Vista as it is. But I wonder about the techies. Some would indeed fight like hell to prevent change -- I was in those wars years ago. On the other hand, there are plenty of techies who are fed up being called on the carpet when corporate secrets leak out, or privacy gets breached and the law comes down on them. The drumbeat of accountability is getting louder... Finally, I go back to the luridly unsuccessful attempts I made to install one Linux software platform after another on my PC. This is over a period of decades, mind you, and even now we see obscure little bits of sand pop into the gears that bring the installation process to a dead halt, time after time, without a decent clue as to why. I wasted *days* on this crap, even with searching the support sites, only to find that some driver doesn't work with some piece of equipment I was using successfully with Windows, or I'd misread the (not-well-written) instructions yet again. Sure, you can get a guru and get it done for a good Asian dinner and maybe a modest fee, but then comes the sequence of updates, upgrades, patches, and mods that happen all the time invisibly in the commercial systems, and you're back at the same restaurant. > My 2¢. > > (btw - you know what I have to do to insert the ¢ symbol on my Mac? > Option-2. To do it in Windows... Well, I know how to do it in Word and > other Office programs, but I'm not sure if I could do it in Firefox > without jumping through a lot of hoops.) > Firefox uses Insert / Characters and Symbols / Common Symbols / ¢ for all that. Yes, it's hoops, but it accommodates all the Euro characters and so on. The usual foofaraw when you want to do something outside your context... (8-). Note: I'm really trying to avoid the MS/Mac debates. I don't care one way or the other as long as I can get done what I want to do. I can do that where I am now, and I can do it fast and I hope reasonably well. I guess that places me with the inertia crowd... (8-D In the end, I see no easy solutions to our global stew of computing troubles, except to carry on as contentiously, creatively, and courageously as we now do. Given our intimate dependence on these machines for our everyday living, we should always be afflicted with such troubles. No troubles, no computers, no Web. Cheers, Dana --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
