On Oct 29, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
There must be something fundamentally wrong if GUI becomes responsible for security.
This is a carryover from Windows. When anti-spyware became popular, Microsoft purchased Giant Anti Sypware, changed the name to Windows Defender and gave it away for free to genuine windows users. Windows Defender is fairly nice to use, it rarely does anything noticable if you are careful about where you go on the web.
The problem with that is marketing. What good is a program you never know you have? When Microsoft integrated Windows Defender into Windows Vista, they made it annoying. It would often ask you for your password, just so that you know you had it there and it was protecting you.
It seems to me that the number two question Windows Vista users asked when they first got the system, was "how do I get it to stop asking me for my password".
As for a GUI being responsible for security, it scares me. My linux boxes do things, and almost all of it is automatic, or via command line SSH. The one box that has a monitor on it and is used in GUI mode runs a version of MythTV, and is controlled by a remote control. Could you imagine, putting in a DVD and being asked to enter a password? Or accessing a network share?
While I'm all for taking the good things that Microsoft does for Windows, re-engineering them and using them in Linux, this to me is a non solution to a non problem, and may be sacrificing headless systems (which make up the bulk of Linux systems currently installed) for a possible future gain in desktop users. IMHO that will never happen because people will never migrate from Windows to Linux if it has all the faults of Windows, they will only migrate if they see a real gain.
Geoff. -- geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendel...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
