<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.8.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Thu, 2006-04-05 at 09:37 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> >>and all that viruses, worm, trojan horses and the like; </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> > The viruses, worms and trojans that haven't impacted my life at all > since my DOS days, you mean? </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> <PRE> </PRE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> 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. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> <PRE> </PRE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> > Idiots are idiots no matter what operating system they run. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> <PRE> </PRE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> 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. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> 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. <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> -- Michael T. Richter Email: ttmrichter@gmail.com, mtr1966@hotpop.com MSN: ttmrichter@hotmail.com, mtr1966@hotmail.com; YIM: michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber: mtr1966@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 </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>