On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:23:19 -0500 Jack disseminated the following: > Don't hold back, Joe... Say what you feel!!! :-) Seriously though, > you are right that perhaps I'm attributing to Linux what only exists in > the Windows world. As a sidenote, I am quite diligent in Windows ---> > Ad Aware, SpyBot, and SpySweeper have pretty much kept my system clean, > as well as AVG anti-virus. I have also disabled most of the Window > services that try to dial out (Love that gpedit.msc!)
Call me crazy if you will, but I'm not overly impressed by someone having to hack some obscure system file in order to prevent their OS from divulging info to it's mothership. To be honest, it would make me a little uneasy, from a security standpoint, that such a file even exists. If you can hack it, so can any teenager with a worm kit. It would be even more disturbing to me that I had to run 4 or 5 different 3rd party apps just so that my supposedly 'state of the art' OS doesn't become a zombie for some spammer. > On another tack... would Bittorrent Windows version be as safe as it is > in Linux? Open source is open source. I would not imagine the coders would be inclined to sneak spyware into the precompiled Win32 binaries, any more than they would otherwise. Only closed-source projects allow for that kind of irresponsibility. > I guess I'm not built that way. I like WinXP; I like Linux. I could > have listed what I don't like about XP here also but the caveats that I > have for XP do not "get in the way" as much as they do for Linux. > However, I *am* a newbie to the Linux world, and my percerption is that > Linux is getting more and more robust as time goes on. God knows, I > would love to see it become a serious player in the OS market. That > would drive Windows prices down, make MS more open to users' needs, and > destroy a de facto monopoly (which is never a good thing in the open > market.) As an example of what I'm talking about, Rogers cable internet > got a whole lot more responsive to the market once Bell came out with > adsl. Besides, there are things in Linux that are superior to XP; it > would be great to be able to go to one or the other as my needs dicated... No problem here, except perhaps that the only reason you can't do everything on Linux you can do on Windows is *because* of the MS monopoly and illegal business practices, and everything you can do on Linux is in spite of it, due to the largely unpaid efforts of a community of dedicated hackers. Best of luck in your future efforts with Mandrake, remember we're always here to help (though, running 9.2 still, I've been about as useful as tits on a bull around here of late...). -- JoeHill / RLU #282046 / www.freeyourmachine.org 08:52:53 up 100 days, 9:44, 5 users, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Gandhi
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