Ballmer security pitch leaves skeptics unswayed

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It much more than that

"In which case Windows may close the majority of their
security holes (big assumption, but it may happen) and
more of Linux's holes exposed."

MS finally got it for SP2, great protection is offered by
simply i) enabling a firewall by default ii) running no
services by default. A home PC should have no internet
facing open ports by default. MS was way slower than
anyone else on this.

Thousands, or possibly millions of vulnerabilities likely
exist in the code of a large GNU/Linux distribution (some
1-2GB of source) however these, even if discovered, aren't
necessary exploitable if protected by a firewall, or the
package isn't installed, or configured in a way to make it
vulnerable.

"...but it only takes one privilege escalation flaw to allow a
virus to spread rapidly"

Privilege escalation requires code executing on the machine
as a local user first. Whilst windows is happy to execute
anything sent to it as an email attachment (going as far as
to ignore the extension and see if it can actually execute
the file anyway) this is not the case under *nix. *nix
distinguishes between data and executables making it far
more difficult for users to install software and indeed is
100% preventable!

"The same situation could happen on Linux if it ever
achieves anywhere near the critical mass of uneducated
users Windows currently has."

Yes it *could* happen, but it is easily preventable under
*nix. Under windows it isn't which is the reason MS is
spending billions and practically getting nowhere (all that
has changed is a greater user awareness).

Posted by: Richard Flude   Posted on: 10/25/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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