mobility and firewall

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 04:20:57PM +0100, Rui Tiago Cação Matos wrote:
>From: HC Brugmans <hcbrugmans at gmail.com>
>Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 16:52:29 +0200
>
>> I have to add that when I switched from windows, being a bit of a power
>> user, the ubuntu experience left me feeling naked and vunerable.
>> I understood the no open ports policy, and was comforted by the lack of
>> threats, but it bugged me greatly that I could not in an easy way check
>> up on what was coming in, and what was going out.
>>
>> The reason for this, is that it was usually my firewall that picked up
>> spy/mal-ware, and the occational virus/trojan first.
>
>As far as I'm aware there are no harmful spy/mal-ware or virus/trojan
>self replicating things that affect GNU/Linux systems. If you know of
>any I'd be glad to know about them too.

I hope you realise your reasoning is dangerous. Just because you don't
know of one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

>> Just another set of user-cases where it'd be useful to be able to keep
>> an eye on things.
>
>Sincerily, I think this whole firewall-on-every-desktop-and-laptop idea
>is kind of moot and something of a bad habit that Windows has inflicted
>upon people. I'm still to be convinced by the way of real use cases
>where/when it would be worth to have such a default setup in place.
>
>Software should be written with security in mind (and I'm sure the
>default programs Ubuntu ships are) and users just shouldn't have to
>worry about it or they will lose much of the fun of using their PCs.

What you are describing is an ideal world. We don't live in an ideal
world. Security is hard to get right. Firefox is a good example of that.
It was designed with security in mind, but as it gains popularity we
start seeing the cracks.

Until the ideal world becomes reality I like having a firewall on my
machines.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://therning.org/magnus

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn
how to do it.
     -- Pablo Picasso
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