Comments on: ‘Switch to Linux,’ continued

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 05:10:39 +0000

“The difference isn’t popularity; it’s design”
Yeah right! Dream on….if I was a hacker, I wouldn’t waste my bragging rights on Linux. Why? Because, if I was a hacker, I would want to do as much damage as possible. I would want my creation on CNN. Going after Linux wouldn’t get me that fame.
But…if one day Linux becomes super popular…people with attitudes such as yours are taunting, to say the least.

The Lounge

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:07:18 +0000

I have explained Security by Obscurity this way in the past:

Security is like a game of chess. There are players working against you which we tend to call “black hats”, and players that are working for you which we tend to call “white hats”. For every move a “black hat” makes, you need to have your own “white hat” making a counter-move so that in the end you win.

What Open Source does is give both the white and black-hats the ability to learn well their craft and practice any time they want. When a white-hat finds a bug in the system they will fix it, essentially removing a possible future move from the black-hat and narrowing down his/her options.

With closed source what you have is a situation where only those willing to break the law, in other words the black-hats, will have the ability to learn and practice their craft. When a potential move is discovered it remains undiscovered and not fixed until it is fully exploited at a public tournament (IE: many computers get broken into).

By tying the hands of the white-hats you end up only ensuring that when the real tournament happens that YOU WILL LOSE!

A few years ago I was involved in a government initiative to help define the Open Source security strategy. The following WIKI contains some of the results: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OpenSourceSecurityStrategy

Russell McOrmond http://www.goslingcommunity.org/

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:05:15 +0000

With Linux, you can have the best of both worlds. Even if a worm is designed to exploit a general Linux flaw, it will most likely not affect me. This is because a made a lame hack that filters exec system calls made from most prgrams that use the Internet. I would have had a hard time doing this within the Winblows environment. Yes, if a security flaw is not fixed, it is possible to include instructions within an exploit to bypass my filtering hack, but anyone with sufficient knowlege can write their own hack that would require different bypass code. Now, imagine virus and exploit writers having to tailor their code to work against a hundred or so hacks. It would make things more difficult, wouldn’t you agree? Welcome to the world of open source.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:10:23 +0000

I’ve been using Fedora Core 3 Linux now for over 3 months, and I regret not having switched sooner. I mean, I don’t have to care about spyware, viruses or anything. Azureus, Apollon, Xnap and WinMX (under WINE) are all running most of the time.
The Open Source world rocks!
DaBlade (666forums.tk, Slyck.com)

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:02:08 +0000

Exactly the way to put it.
As a longtime Linux user, it really angers me to see m$ propaganda that is full of lies.