On Mon, Jan 09, 2012, Zeev Pekar wrote about "Re: Social Justice II. Digital Revolution 2012.": > It is exactly what Matrix did - they bought a company that deals with > credit cards fraud several days ago. That company provides no technology
Ok, I can understand why if the media deals with IT security, IT companies will want to boast having (so-called) security products. But I don't understand why you think that the government will want to boast security products too... The government doesn't sell products... What *might* happen is that the government will want to pass new *laws*, e.g., stating guidelines how credit card numbers should be protected. What worries me that such laws (or alternatively, rules set by the credit card companies) will dictate the use of specific non-free software (e.g., specific hypervisor, OS or DB system). If that is proposed we should fight that. But your fear was different - that the government "buy some ugly expensive software" - and I don't understand how that would happen. > It's more about attitude rather than about particular software. If you > use FOSS you always check what happens with other similar projects, so While wishing Free Software to become more common, you need to be aware of the "victim of its own sucess" phenomenon: As long as Free Software is only used in a minority of systems and typically installed by more knowledgable users, one might get the impression that free software is more secure, is better maintained than commercial software, and the "attitude" of its users (as you put it) is better than that of proprietary software users. But what will happen if one day Free Software wins, and *everybody* uses it? Do you think virus writers and other criminals will continue to focus on breaking into Windows because it's easier? Do you think that users will still have that good "attitude" and continue to "check what happens with other similar projects" like you said they do now? No, unfortunately I predict that if some free software becomes very popular, it will be shown just about as insecure as the non-free software that preceded it, and stupid users will use it in a stupid way which negates whatever security the software did have - just like they previously did with the previous proprietary software. I'm not taking a big risk with this prediction, because it's exactly what has already happened. When people switched in the 90s from SunOS to Linux (for example), did the number of breakins significantly change? When in the early 90s most of the Internet was run by free software servers, e.g., sendmail, wuftpd, BIND, etc., was it free from security vulnerabilities, worms, and so on? No. Anyway, my point is that there are excellent reasons for a country to promote both the use, and the development, of free software. There's no need to bring in wrong reasons, like promising that it will magically solve credit card security problems, or improve the attitude or knowledge of system administrators. -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jan 9 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Committee: A group of people that keeps http://nadav.harel.org.il |minutes and wastes hours. _______________________________________________ Discussions mailing list Discussions@hamakor.org.il http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussions
