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bloodnose

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    anybody not use windows?

    in HHPlace Cafe! - General chit chat

    Posted

    Emma's right... that copy of Windows XP that any of you have isn't yours. You've just bought a licence to use it on one machine, and one machine only.

    I use linux... have done for about 3 years now. It's got me very frustrated at times, but all in all... it's a dream. New hardware is always an interesting experience though. Can often take a day or more before I can get the new thing working.

    The reason microsoft products are targeted so badly is because its the most popular - If linux was widely used like windows then that would be targeted too

    With all due respect Richie, I'm afraid that is completely untrue. Apache is the world's most widely used Webserver. It is an open source project, much like linux. However... Microsoft's IIS gets a lot more abuse and attacks, despite it not being the most widely used web server. The reason? It's not made so well. I'm not suggesting that open source software is flawless, but it is made a LOT better. Also to that point, when bugs are found, they are fixed very quickly, and full details of the problem and the fix are made available. With Microsoft, they tend to downplay the situation a lot and then 9 months later, there'll be a fix for the problem, bundled in with a 90MB service pack which is inappropriate for dialup users, and often has reported cases of breaking something else that worked.

    As for the Linux and Mac versus Windows. I don't know a lot about Macs, so I'll focus mainly on linux here. Windows is insecure by design. Not even gonna dwell on the numerous accounts of where activex has proved fatal for explorer users (gotta love that spyware...) but Windows on the whole, is insecure by design. The reason you don't get so many worms and virus' for Linux is because it's a lot harder to a) make them, and :roll: deploy them. When Joe User opens Outlook Express and gets an e-mail from someone he doesn't know, he opens it, and right on that spot, he's screwed. Chances are he's running as administrator, if in the very slim chance he isn't, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a known exploit that the virus will use for priveledge escalation. If Joe User on Linux opens his favourite mail client, it wont run the virus automatically, it would require the user to save it to his hard drive, and run it manually. Windows programs don't work on Linux so we can already be safe there, but in the very slim chance a linux virus comes through, the worst I can think of that can happen, is that it would delete that guy's work. It wouldn't even be able to format the hard drive, since the filesystems that Linux uses are also more secure by design. Also for whatever reason you don't see any self propagating worms for linux. I'm not entirely sure why this is, to be honest. I guess it's partly to do with the method that's required to execute something. You would know very well whether or not you ran it, and you could kill it just as easily. Although I guess it could silently fork() off and hide in the background. Hm, I'm not too sure about that one...

    My main point here though is that Windows is not a good target because it's so widely used (see Apache comment), but it's simply because it's an easier target.

    Steven

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