Re: [PLUG] Linux Virus Writing HOWTO

[Mental Patient <mental@neverlight.com>]

On Sat, 2002-03-16 at 11:20, Michael Leone wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-03-15 at 08:37, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> > 
> > Is the real reason *nix is relatively spared virus problems practical 
> > rather than technical?
> 
> What about Win2000, then? It's security model tries to come close to a
> Unix model, with user accounts deliberately kept separate from the
> "root" user.
>

What about win200? I'm not being inflamatory here, but MS _still_
doesn't get it. User accounts are NOT kept separate from the 'root'
user. During the win2k install, you are asked to create a 'user'
account. This user account is in the administrators group. Thats the
same thing as creating a 'user' account on your linux box with a uid of
0. Instead of typing 'root' to login, you can now type 'bob'. 

Further, have you tried using w2k after you go out of your way to
tighten security? Its not very fun. There's a large number of
applications out there that assume they can do whatever they want to
your registry and spew files whereever they want. Which is fine on a
fat32 partition, but on an ntfs partition that you're trying to lock
down.... its really very annoying.

Don't get me wrong. W2K is great for what it is, but its still apples
and oranges. In addition to 'fixing' their OS, they also need to 'fix' a
large number of developers who've all learned the Wrong Way. Security is
still a new concept to MS.

I don't hate Microsoft. I'm fairly agnostic about software. Windows has
some great audio software available to it, and as a single user
workstation its great. But as a mission critical anything? I guess I
just don't trust it. Awesome for entertainment and games, but thats
about it in my opinion.

-- 
 
Mental (Mental@NeverLight.com)

I can levitate birds.  No one cares.
--Steven Wright

GPG public key: http://www.neverlight.com/Mental.asc

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