William L. Jarrold wrote:
Hi,
When I see announcements like the below, I get really angry and I think (to myself) stuff like...
(1) the security problem is that people use windows.
(2) If everyone switched to unix/linux systems would be 99% (90%???, 99.9%???) more secure.
(3) Windows has serious misfeatures and bugs related to security.
(4) e.g. one such misfeature is that Winblows thinks that every file is a program to be executed. unix/linux, by contrast, implements the distinction between executable and non-executable files.
...I don't yell (or at least, try not to (-;) this to all my friends bc my understanding of these issues is primitive and quite likely wrong. Thus, trumpeted my views would risk being accused of "crying wolf." At the risk of starting a flame war I would love to hear people improve upon the above assertions.
To the extent that some approximation of assertions 1 thru 4 are true, at least one person from this list should go to this meeting and as calmly as possible state/ask during the Q/A somethign to the effect of "just get rid of windows, adopt unix/linux and 99% of your problems will go away."
Then the answer to that question will be "where do your numbers come from?" And you'll find yourself in an endless battle between microsoft based research versus open-systems based research data. The bottom line if you magically take average windows user and convert them to linux desktop users, they will continue to behave the way they did. And malicious people will eventually find a lot of ways to exploit the naive user, even in linux. I am not on top these things, since I use linux on occasional basis, but I do see people raising security concerns over desktop implimentations, or desktop applications that gives average users more flexibility (hence more power to make mistakes).
I am not going to argue that whether linux is more secure or not. What I see is on average linux community is a lot more pro-active (and a hell a lot more computer literated) on these issues. Try explaining these sort of issues to people who wants to share their cooking recipes in their website over some ISP.
Regardless, I'd still like to see the reaction to the question though...
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