Good to know that in the community our sense of Humor hasn't diminished.. I was laughing after reading almost every post... Nice way to cheer up a geek.

you cant gte more secure than an abacus!

thopugh if you want a full os i belive that solaris is extreamly secure

It would seem that no one from comp.os.vms is interested in stating the superiority of VMS to Windows, Linux, UNIX, or anything else.

Windows XP

Windows 95 ofcourse.
















in wine

hahaha

I think that "out of the box" gives varied levels of security...let's take two extremes, for instance...

M$ Windows XP is designed with security as an after-thought...you install, then you get to tweaking stuff and installing security programs. Out of the box, very insecure.

OpenBSD is designed with security in mind...you install, then you spend time opening up the services you want to make available. Yeah, you'll spend a lot of time making the machine usable, but "out of the box" it's vastly more secure than Windows XP.

Either way, you're spending time after install to balance security and functionality.

That's not totally true, only partially.

The most secure OS is the one that is not connected to any network and is also powered off, with no physical access to the machine. That's the only way an OS is secure in my opinion..

Exactly, I mean, look at that network security admin video "Mission Impossible". They had that one in a room off the network with lasers and yet someone still got in. If they'd had sharks in the ventilation ducts they'd have been fine, but they scrimped and look what happened.

So you need technical security, physical security, lasers and sharks to make the system properly secure.

Sharks? As in "Sharks with frickin' lazer beams..."?

heh

Nope - that's a single point of failure in my book. What is the laser beam is reflected bac at the shark with a handy mirror? or if the shark is looking in the wrong direction? No, sharks AND lasers give that extra level of redundancy which allows me to sleep safely in my bed.

Well, as safely as one can with laser beams and sharks all over the place.

Don't forget the evil porcupine as well alongside the sharks.. that's what makes a fully secure computer.

Are piranhas a suitable alternative to sharks?

And maybe a grue or two!

Only use piranhas when your porcupine has eaten so much that the shark complains. Remember: fish aren't unionised and can be replaced whenever you feel like it.

I don't know why, but for some reason that sounds like brilliant advice.

Thats what I'm going to tell everyone who asks a question related to the balance between security and convenience and it'll sound like I'm saying something.

And if they ask what I means, I'll say "Pester not the man guarding the barbed fence. Theres a tcp for every ip."