The Ubuntu Experiment

Derek Broughton news at pointerstop.ca
Tue Aug 5 17:30:58 UTC 2008


Steve C. Lamb wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 09:10:18PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> 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.
> 
>     Yes, it does.  You're naive to think otherwise.  What's the
>     difference?  I
> have a heavily infected WinXP system sitting on my desk that I've been
> tasked
> to get running again.  Chances are I'm going to have to wipe the hard
> drive
> clean and start from scratch.  If I am dumb and let something in my home
> dir which trashes my files then, even on a single user system, *the system
> is still functional and you're able to perform some recovery of data using
> uninfected portions of the system*.  That difference is HUGE for anyone
> who has gone through it.

That's still merely a matter of time, and you're naive to think otherwise. 
The "fixed" portions of an OS are to all purposes, unimportant.  Even on
Windows you can restore those simply.  It's the user data that matters.  
-- 
derek





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