On Friday 12 November 2004 06:33, David Cormier wrote: > There is a difference. Performance in some ways yes. Software all over > the place. But at the end of the day, people like Anne (whom I've never > even read before) are the reason I'm going to stick it out.
I usually respond to these types of messages relatively harshly but I am trying refrain currently. However, for the record. I have a friend who bought a new computer back in January. I wanted to try to get him setup with Linux and had fully intended to install Mandrake. However, he is using a few different pieces of hardware that are the Win-only variety, including a winmodem and refused to spend a little extra money to upgrade to something decent. So, I installed WinXp, SP2 on his machine, setup anti-virus, firewall, spybot S&D, spambot for spamfiltering, etc. pretty much everything except a privacy proxy for web browsing. He is low maintenance anyway, mostly web browsing and email so no big deal. Yesterday, he asked me to stop by because he was getting intermittent alerts from the anti-virus access scanner and his internet connection was slow. So, six months after a virgin install, he had managed to get infected with 3 trojans that had backdoor components and were communicating with a network out of British Telecom's range. Don't know when they got put there or how (he swore he didn't install anything or open any email attachments but I have my doubts about that), but they were adept enough to avoid detection by McAfee. (I am currently researching to see if I can figure out what they were) I had to find and remove them individually by checking network access with a packet sniffer. They were sitting in the windows/system32 directory and were marked hidden so that they wouldn't be easily found. So, when I see someone complain about Linux not being ready for primetime because it doesn't include something like voice recognition (nice but most people wouldn't classify that as a major necessity), and remember how WinXP got compromised within six months even with precautions having been taken, I really have to laugh out loud. With WinXP, I still can't be sure the user actually intalled or opened anything, there are simply too many security holes that could account for the trojans being there. -- Bryan Phinney
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