From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Mon Oct 21 2002 - 14:11:13 MDT
On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> There are few viruses which have been written for linux. A
The amount of vulnerabilities for open source *nixen is maybe one half to
one third of Redmond's offerings, by benchmark of bugtraq listings (of
course, one doesn't count the same vulnerability in different
distributions multiply, unless one is a FUD monger). Most reasons for this
is because Redmond subscribes to security by obscurity, whereas the open
source community exposes its soft white underbelly and throat completely
to straight razor wielding street rabble. There is not much open source
wormviruses around because the admins are more or less competent, and keep
the system well patched, virulence is much attenuated by high dilution
(there's value of diversity vividly illustrated). Plus, average *nix has a
clear distinction between user and admin, whereas the canonical way to get
anything done under Redmondware is a user with full admin rights.
> windows-aimed virus cannot attack linux or mac or BeOS, etc, nor can
> the reverse occur.... yet.
Coding crossplatform worms is a lot of work. Way more work than your
average h4x0r d00d is willing to invest. If we had 10 independent-codebase
platforms with each 10% of market share we wouldn't be seeing any worms.
Speaking of which, if we didn't have executable documents, and buggy
browsers and mailers from Redmond, we wouldn't be seeing any wormviruses,
either.
> If you do 99% of your work on one box, it will crash 100 times more
> frequently than the other box, at the very least.
My Linux boxen don't crash. Apps do, now and then, especially the complex
ones. If I will let the Mozilla sit for a week or two with a few 'bad'
sites open, eventually the swap will run full due to memory leaks (thank
you so much for rich content, web monkeys), and the box will grind to a
halt. It's happening as we speak, so I will have to save the state, and
restart Mozilla sometime soon.
> For four years, I did pretty heavy graphic and publishing work on an
> NT4 box, while using the linux box for mail, ftp, and web serving.
I use NT 4.0 SP6 at work as desktop (not willingly), Linux at home (both
desktop and server).
> Early frequent crashes on the NT box were due to a) an unstable
> application suite (Corel Ventura 7), b) a publication 1800 pages long
> that had been upgraded through 4 versions of Ventura and thus had lots
> of corrupt code in it, and c) an underpowered machine for the size
A publication doesn't have code, corrupt, or not. (Unless you mean TeX or
PostScript, which are all code, not data) I presume the Ventura bombed,
and took the OS down along with it.
> publication I was working on. I eventually was able to clean things up
> so that I could operate the NT machine for a month or more without
> crashing, while doing even more work than I was able to do when I
> started.
The user should not have to adapt herself to the machine. It should be the
other way around.
> The amount of work the linux box did was rather trivial in comparison
> yet still crashed a couple times a year, and was incapable of filtering
> out email attached viruses targeted at MS operating systems. I know of
Your experience is rather atypical, to say the least.
> no linux application that can handle as large and complex a publication
> as I did all the time with Ventura (unless Corel has ported Ventura to
> linux by now).
If you're tied to a particular application (you probably have good reasons
why you let yourself get hooked), you don't really have a choice.
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