{"id":305,"date":"2002-10-17T00:46:00","date_gmt":"2002-10-17T05:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=305"},"modified":"2002-10-17T00:46:00","modified_gmt":"2002-10-17T05:46:00","slug":"305","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine pointed this out to me, (something a subscriber<\/a> of his wrote in a long, gee-aren’t-I-a-cool-little-coder post<\/a>) and requested that I dispense with some enlightening tidbits, and I ask you, my friends, to reply with your thoughts as well, as I am far less computer saavy, particularly computer security saavy, than some of you.. I knew this would be long, which is another part of why it’s here.<\/p>\n

The other half of that equation is that I wanted something that was actually secure. I read an interesting article about recent security concerns and I was appalled at the responses of so many so called “professionals” who insisted that Unix and Linux were more secure operating systems. It doesn’t take much of a brain to figure out that if you hang the source code out there like a surrender flag – it would be easy for anyone to hack the security of these systems. So why aren’t they targeted with more viruses? Virus writers seek to disable the broadest range of systems where they attract the most attention, and that is simply the Windows platform. I won’t disagree with the response that if you find a security hole in Unix or Linux that you can fix it yourself, which is certainly a plus (but can’t you usually do that in Windows too?). However, since there is no such thing as absolute security (meaning that even when holes are identified and patched, there is always another way to exploit the same flaw), making the source code available increases the risk for security breaches. In the end, no one choice in an OS platform is more secure than any other, so they are at least on level ground.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, let’s get a few things straight here. Unix and Linux are, not, in fact, one and the same. Not all unix (and unixoid) operating systems are open source. Windows didn’t even develop the concept of ‘users’ with authentication and until the mid-to-late 90’s, with windows NT, copied lock stock and barrel from Unix, which I’m pretty sure started on this plan, the most fundamental part of security, in the 70’s. And, idiot, if an operating system isn’t open source, how am I going to figure out the vulnerabilities and fix them when dork-boy down the hall blue screens my system with the hack he picked up from his 1334 friend at a different school, let alone submit them to microsoft? The central idea of an open-source operating system is that it is reviewed by the community of users who then fix the broken bits. The central idea of a vender provided operating system, sans source, is that you don’t have to know what’s happening under the hood. Indeed the hood is welded shut. You need special tools and alot of know-how to get under it. And if it breaks, whether because of the instability of the engine or someone threw something in the exhaust pipe? Well, you’re screwed, reinstall. <\/p>\n

There are security exploits for probably every operating system out there. People do hack linux boxes. But, the exploits vary in frequency, ease of exploitation, publication of warnings, mean time to fix, etc. I’d be willing to bet that the open-source OSes come out on top in those evaluations. On the other hand, your absurd statements at the end, which I’ll paraphrase, “you can never really fix a problem, you just have to live with it” and “all operating systems are the same as far as security goes” (which contradicts your thesis, btw) are examples of some of the laziest thinking I’ve seen. Where is your backing for any of this? I’ll just let you know they’re false, and leave it up to the professionals you denigrate to explain the details \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine pointed this out to me, (something a subscriber of his wrote in a long, gee-aren’t-I-a-cool-little-coder post) and requested that I dispense with some enlightening tidbits, and I ask you, my friends, to reply with your thoughts as well, as I am far less computer saavy, particularly computer security saavy, than some … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}