* Steve Wolfe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[scanning for MS viruses under MS OSes]
> Well, in a world devoid of any other security mechanisms, perhaps.
> But it's perfectly easy to simply deny all traffic to the machine not
> related to SMTP, at the router, firewall, and on the machine itself.
> It's hard to exploit something on the machine if your packets never
> get there.
man gauntlet
>> > I trust stuff I pay for more than free, open source scripting efforts.
> Well, it's sixes. Some commercial software is well-written, a lot
> isn't.
I beg to differ. You simply cannot know if closed source commercial
software is well written. I may seem to work well, but you don't know
what's under the hood. Back in university, we had the NT 4.0 CD that we
installed on a spare computer for laughs. We had blocked it inside a
firewall. It sent two crypted emails. We let them free. They disappeared
behind a MSN firewall. We did not laugh.
> Some open-source software is well-written, I've found a lot that's
> not. It all comes down to the individual package.
That's so true it's meaningless, I'd say. There is a lot of really bad
software available especially for Linux, true. But if you take a well
audited distribution (Jurix would be one) or stick to a core *BSD, you'll
find that the code base is excellent. It still remains to be shown how
you break into a bare-bones OpenBSD. I could not say that for a couple
commercial OSes. Bottom line: every system can be made insecure. But some
"packages" are secure by default. qmail springs to mind ;-) Stick to
those and you're fine.
--
Robin S. Socha <http://socha.net/>
