The Ubuntu Experiment

[Derek Broughton]

Steve C. Lamb wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 09:24:06PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Oh give me a break.  "It" doesn't get spyware.  Idiot users get spyware.
> 
>     If by idiot users you mean the average person who is unaware of
>     security
> concerns with running anything Microsoft, then yes.  Sorry, if you take
> the same user and plop them on any other OS and they don't get spyware
> then it isn't the user that's the problem, it is the OS.

Not remotely true.  Windows is a target, because it's the easiest - both
because of the software and because of the volume.  But if you can get
people to install software without any regards to safeguards, linux is no
less vulnerable than any other OS.  People continually point out that "you
can only trash your own files" (which is of course only true if you can't
get them to install it as root).  Big deal - if its a single-user system it
doesn't matter _whose_ files I'm corrupting.
> 
>     To ensure that the average users on my home network don't get their
> machines hosed I have had to impress upon them that browsing throgh a
> squid/adzapper proxy is a good thing, weened them off of IE as much as
> possible, installed adblockplus, run my own mail server with anti-virus
> and spam scanning (both incoming and outbound) and ensure their virus
> scanner is
> up to date.  I'm not being elitest in saying I would not expect the
> average user to do even half that.

Nope.  And I don't.  I _do_ get my mail through servers that use their own
AV.  imo, that's all it really takes, if you're halfway careful about what
you download.   As for home networks - my wife's an absolute loss when it
comes to anything PC oriented, and I've never had to clean viruses off her
system either.

>> Absolutely.  I said "for all its faults".  It has many, but it crashes no
>> more often than any other OS.
> 
>     And as people have pointed out here, your anecdotal evidence is
>     running face first into ours.  

Well, no, that's _our_ anecdotal evidence - at least as many posts agreed
with me as with you, and there's plenty of backup from the magazine
reviewers.
-- 
derek