__/ [ B Gruff ] on Saturday 30 September 2006 18:38 \__
> On Saturday 30 September 2006 18:30 Richard Rasker wrote:
>
>>
>> We all know the drill: Whenever we point out that the security of Windows
>> has an appalling track record, with hundreds of thousands of viruses,
>> countless critical (and slowly patched) flaws in IE, and a whole slew of
>> other nigh disastrous problems, the Windows shills come up with the one
>> Magic Excuse: "That's because it's the Biggest Target, you stoopid!"
>>
>> According to them, Linux, BSD or MacOS are just as vulnerable as Windows
>> (if not more, hahaha, the idea!), it's just that hardly any hacker thinks
>> attacking them is worth the trouble, because perhaps ten percent of people
>> use these OS'es.
>> "If Linux would have the market share Windows has, there'd be the very
>> same massive problems with botnets, spam, and malware", "Linux just isn't
>> an interesting target at all", "Social engineering makes any OS completely
>> defenseless. But hackers only go after the largest platform", "Complexity
>> [to execute arbitrary code] is no deterrent." Et cetera, and so on, ad
>> nauseam.
>>
>>
>> Apart from the fact that these people appear somewhat detached from
>> reality, I found that they're actually digging their own grave.
>> It's quite simple, really:
>>
>> Let's assume that these people are actually right, and that Microsoft's
>> approximately 90% market share is the first and foremost cause of the
>> current malware and spam crisis.
>> Well then, this can lead to only one conclusion, and only one solution -
>> and it's so obvious that even the biggest Microsoft apologist can't but
>> agree.
>>
>> Microsoft's market share must be cut down drastically, by forced
>> government measures if need be.
>>
>> I propose a phased approach, bringing down the percentage of Windows
>> computers with 15% annually, to avoid creating instant IT chaos (um, well,
>> more chaos than today, that is), for five years to come. After this
>> period, we'll not just have a nice, healthy, heterogenous IT environment,
>> with vastly less malware and spam, but lots of other benefits as well,
>> such as universal interoperability, general adherence to open standards,
>> more choice, cheaper computing, and lots more.
>>
>> And, of course, I count on the co-operation of all those Windows fans
>> here - it's their current "Biggest Target" conviction that largely
>> implies this course of action in the first place. So people, let's go do
>> some cutting down and diversifying!
>
> Exactly:-)
>
> I go back to the question I posed earlier - "Why did so many Irish people
> suffer and die in the potato famine(s) of the 19th century?"
Diversifiaction is a natural choice, but I can't say that I agree with
Richard (yes, I know it was sarcasm). Governments increasingly choose Open
Source because they /do/ appreciate its merits and inherent security. After
all, it is not Linux whose majority of code needs to be scraped and
(re)written from scratch. Moreover, companies whose interests lie in the
insecurities of Windows, seem to sidle with logic, e.g.:
Trend Micro: Open source is more secure
,----[ Quote ]
| Antivirus vendor Trend Micro is claiming that open-source software is
| inherently more secure than proprietary software such as Microsoft
| Windows.
|
| "Open source is more secure. Period," Raimund Genes, chief technical
| officer for anti-malware at Trend, said. "More people control the code
| base; they can react immediately to vulnerabilities; and open source
| doesn't have so much of a problem with legacy code because of the
| number of distributions."
|
| Genes said open-source developers "openly talk about security," so
| patches are "immediate--as soon as something happens," whereas
| proprietary vendors with closed code have to rely purely on their
| own resources to push patches out.
`----
http://news.com.com/2100-7355_3-6083490.html?part=rss&tag=6083490&subj=news
Trend Micro CTO hints that Trend will Open Source Code
,----[ Quote ]
| In a stunning revelation in Trend Micro: Open source is more secure,
| Trend CTO Raimund Genes hints that Trend may release their code as
| an open source project!
`----
http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/2006/06/14/435960.aspx
Lastly:
The short life and hard times of a Linux virus
,----[ Quote ]
| For a Linux binary virus to infect executables, those executables must
| be writable by the user activating the virus. That is not likely to be
| the case. Chances are, the programs are owned by root and the user is
| running from a non-privileged account. Further, the less experienced
| the user, the lower the likelihood that he actually owns any
| executable programs. Therefore, the users who are the least savvy about
| such hazards are also the ones with the least fertile home directories
| for viruses.
|
| [...]
`----
http://librenix.com/?inode=21
|
|
