[pchelpers] Re: Watchtower On Linux

Hi Scott

> GDW> Well you could have knocked me over with a feather. I knew that
> GDW> some viruses could affect Linux through e-mail, on many in the
> GDW> list it does not state how it is transmitted, thus the mode could
> GDW> still be e-mail, although it stands to reason that since packages
> GDW> are opensource that someone may insert a virus into the code.
> GDW> However it is still apparent that Linux is still the safer
> GDW> choice.
> 
> My honest opinion is that this is only because of lack of market
> share.

Even if this were true, it would seem to be a good reason to switch. If 
and only if Linux got such a large share of the market that it'd become 
a more interesting target for malware writers and if and only if their 
malware was effective, that would still mean many years of peace and 
quiet for people who switched to Linux now. In addition, it seems that 
none of the viruses written for Linux have ever propagated successfully!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_computer_viruses

The situation seems to be the same as with Firefox. There are obviously 
unknown security flaws in FF that theoretically can be exploited by 
malware writers, but this will probably never happen because the code is 
corrected too quickly. In addition, there are many less unknown 
programming flaws of any kind in FF than in IE because anyone can 
critically study the source code.

As far as i know, Linux is programmed very carefully line by line, even 
more carefully than FF, and freely checked by thousands of critical eyes 
whereas Windows code is an unbelievable mess. As far as i know, Windows 
code consists to a large part of hastily added new features quick 
combinations of different projects and has huge amounts of ugly hacks to 
make these work together with the rest and contains huge amounts of 
bloat. The sheer size of Windows is enough to prove that it is very 
badly written code. BTW, this argument also indirectly proves that Opera 
is still better than Firefox although Firefox is getting smaller.

Most importantly, i have read very convincing articles claiming that 
Windows is full of huge amounts of security flaws i.e. holes due to 
sloppy programming whereas the few holes found in Linux are always 
quickly patched. Many if not most of the Windows security holes are not 
known to Microsoft and many if not most of those known are not patched 
until they are discovered by hackers or crackers and most of them are 
not fixed until they are exploited by crackers. Worse still, some of 
them are not even fixed then for long periods of time.

I don't know whether the hackers and crackers find the Windows security 
holes because they have illegal copies of Windows's source code or 
because they use reverse engineering, but it's clear that it's a very 
bad idea to prevent most programmers from analysing Windows code. Most 
people are honest, and almost all become honest if there's social 
control. Now, the proportion of malevolent to normal programmers 
studying Windows is much higher than it would ever be for Linux even if 
it had as large a market share as Windows and even if it were as 
sloppily programmed.

> Most of the antivirus vendors offer a Linux product.

Most vendors of anything are willing to sell even useless versions of 
their products as long as people buy it. As far as i know, most Linux 
owners have never encountered as virus and simply laugh at the idea of 
installing antivirus software. Perhaps the only Linux operators that get 
AV are IT experts at companies who want to make sure they don't lose 
their job due to claims of negligence. It's well known that companies 
buy a lot of completely unnecessary junk, especially in the security 
sector, instead of applying simple common sense. For example, good old 
old-fashioned uniformed guards are much more effective than intrusion 
prevention systems, and often even cheaper than the fancier ones, but 
all new fads are easy to sell.

> After some scrounging, I found this page:
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

Apparently those figures are off by about an order of magnitude for 
Linux, see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Windows_and_Linux#Desktop

See also 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Windows_and_Linux#Security



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