[Off Topic] Re: Linux security

[Michael T. Richter]

On Thu, 2006-04-05 at 09:37 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> >>and all that viruses, worm, trojan horses and the like;



> > The viruses, worms and trojans that haven't impacted my life at all 
> > since my DOS days, you mean?



> The same trojans and viruses that rendered my family's computer unusable 
> last week (and is still unusable) inspite of having an anti-virus, 
> firewall, spyware scanner, never using IE, installing security updates, 
> and being conscious computer users. Those viruses and trojans.



> > Idiots are idiots no matter what operating system they run.



> The problem with Windows is that you need to be an expert to not get 
> hit. My family members are far from idiots. They are knowledgeable and 
> conscious computer users who take every precaution. And right now the 
> only computer that works at their home is the Linux one.


My mother hardly constitutes an expert.  This is the person who still
hasn't quite grokked the idea of cutting and pasting.  Who had to be
shown that she didn't need to manually hit the enter key at the end of
each line in a word processor.  Yet she has never, not even once, been
hit by a virus, a trojan or a worm.

And before you make the usual leap of logic -- the only way in which she
can communicate with me is via the Internet.  She's connected 24x7.
What's even funnier is that she doesn't even have a hardware firewall.
She uses the firewall built into Windows XP.  And she uses Outlook
Express.  And Internet Explorer.

If you're getting hit by worms, trojans and viruses I'm sorry, but
you're doing something positively, absolutely WRONG.  And you'll do all
those very same things wrong if you use Linux and Linux is the target of
worms, trojans and viruses.

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"Thanks to the Court's decision, only clean Indians or colored people
other than Kaffirs, can now travel in the trams." --Mahatma Gandhi
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