This is exactly what LQ is *NOT* about.

Geez - talk about being mis-quoted. A couple of points of clarification:

1. Per the LQ Rules which everyone agreed to follow when they became members, discussions need to avoid personal attacks and disparaging/insulting remarks to other LQ'ers. A comment suggesting that another LQ'er increase his/her Prozac dosage hardly qualifies as a neutral remark.

2. All moderators are responsible for keeping discussions on topic. If a given conversation shows the signs of getting off-track (as evidenced by 4 letter words, insults, and challenges, etc, such as we've seen here) then the participants should not be surprised to see a request to stay on topic. This hardly equates to being "pissed off" or being on some sort of High Executioner power trip as you apparently suggest.

If you have any questions about this, Email me. Meantime, let's drop the attitude and keep the discussion moving in a positive direction. Thanks. -- J.W.

Hey, man! I was only kiddin'! Didn't mean nothin'. There should be some protocols built in to suggest tone-of-voice or something. Ease up on the umbrage, my friend. Excess negativity is not good for health.
You folks at admin are workin' way too hard. I abjectly and respectfully suggest a short vacation. Such things lead to great happiness and joy in life.

I agree. Every day I think of all those people working hard to get stuff working in Linux and also making Linux stuff work in Windows. Love those guys.

Btw, I agree with hari_seldon, you need to ease up a little, J.W.

Well, as long as things stay friendly and the conversation doesn't fall apart, then no trouble. To be honest I'm pretty surprised that anyone would interpret my earlier comment (post 25) as some sort of heavy-handed, uptight, and irate demand. That's not the way I intended it to come across. As I've said before, as mods we often see threads spin wildly out of control when a little jostling in a discussion turns into a flame-war, so we try to monitor things pretty closely. Sorry if the tone wasn't right -- J.W.

I know this article may not be real clear but It came from linuxnews.com.

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure...20900826OSHLKE

I don't agree with the guy but he says the same thing.
Honeypot experiments are good sources of info. An unpatch linux distro lasts like 4 months in the net as opposed to 4 minutes for a unpatched windows box. Symantec has some good honeypot articles.

You have to admit: Linux is a risk to Microsoft's security.

You guys showed me that I failed at the purpose of this thread. I wanted show people a bigger picture, but now when people come to read this post, they will leave with just the notion of two people bickering.

Oh, well I tried. But I wont Give Up! :-) Maybe not on this thread, but my spirit is alive, and the Open Source Psychology is in my veins.

Signing off,
~Bryon

You are a good man Jimmy, and odd man, but a good one. Although I love opensource, I havnt paid for software in years so it doesnt matter much to me, but thats just me.....

Hey, I use Linux as much as the next geek. There are those in this thread (who shall remain nameless) who went so far as to imply that proprietary windoze was better than opensource GNU/Linux simply because they said so, and chose to ignore the facts in the face of business-class propaganda. Most people nowadays get windoze illegally, & then fill up their compus with pirated software downloaded by bittorrent that is riddled with trojans and spyware programs from Gator INC. that use keystroke loggers to steal credit card nos, and lo and behold, some redneck in Oklahoma is driving a pickup truck in your name! This demonstrates their hypocrisy, claiming on one hand that software that costs is better and that the only people who use opensource are seditious communists or whatever, then briskly firing up their azureus to download alcohol from suprnova.org and snickering with their false sense of sagacity. I am a bloke with principles so I don't use warez at all. The GPL offers the best of both worlds, (essentially) free software that's typically of superior quality to anything from microsoft, and open-source standards that maintain the quality , safety and (yes) trust that you cannot get from binaries compiled by people not willing to submit their source-code for scrutiny.

That statment is so full of false crap that its not even worth arguing with. I can tell you have never downloaded something.

This especially caught my eye though:
The whole point of pirated software is to get a program that costs money. 99% of the time "pay" programs DO NOT contain spyware. Although some keygens or crack will through in a trojan, its not common.

I don't get it.
The above statement isn't even coherent enough for sober people to understand.

Let me see...
" I can tell you have never downloaded something"

Trying to get past the obvious grammatical boo-boo's, I assume you intend to accuse me of not downloading "something".

So, when you fail to make your arguments using sensible statements, you respond with personal attacks. Bravo! This is quite typical.

Never fear, though. Even after being street-bullied by moderators, I shall not hesitate to speak the truth.

However, I find it vaguely offensive and hypocritical that a bald personal attack like this is allowed, but a few quips made by yours truly are modded down as "flamebait" or whatever. Even slashdot is better moderated than this!

Sorry, but I won't take this bait and stoop to this level of defamation, so I shall conclude with a simple question and a few comments.


Question:If I have never downloaded "something",then how do you explain my vieweing of this page, which is "something" that I have "downloaded" from the Linuxquestions.org mailman server using my Firefox client to my host machine, then rendered by the gtk-GUI that acts as a frontend to the client engine???eh???





Comment:

Ahem, an interestingly worded statement. You ought to work for the People's War group. The pay is crap, but you get to meet a lot of oddballs.


While being factually true, the statement attempts to legitimize the act of piracy by implying that "the best way to get cool stuff is to steal it". You almost sound like a Maoist.
No. I'll still follow the law.




The 1% is bad enough.
GPL'ed software is 100% spyware-free.
Works for me! I don't have to live with the constant uncertainty of getting my SSN stolen.

In conclusion:
Your statements are actually worse than "crap". They are apparent thruths that try to justify crimes.

If you're downloading from sources other than the original projects, how can you be sure someone didn't patch the GPL program and slip a keylogger or VNC into place? Can you REALLY be sure? Even from the original source, it can be risky - there have been instances of such trojan horses managing to find their way into OFFICIAL source trees, and they have been generally found right away, but it goes to show that the risk is there.

On the other hand, Microsoft's network has been breached, gigs worth of Source leaked, so with security like that who knows what the heck is getting checked into the Windows tree? (How's that for a 180* spin on FUD? )

Similarily, some of the most trusted big names (IBM was one) have been affected by viri, and in at least one case thousands of CDs were produced and shipped to customers before the problem was discovered.

My point?

There is no magic bullet for security. You may mistrust Microsoft, but when you go to GPL software, whom are you trusting? If you're a head-in-the-sand CYA corporate suit, you're going to choose Microsoft, because if your company gets hacked, well, you can point at Windows and say "See, we're FORCED to go with Windows because that's what everyone uses - it's not MY fault our chosen platform got hacked." On the other hand, you may be in a large company with vast resources which can afford to audit the source packages, so you download the GPL source from the project page(s), execute a comprehensive code review, standardize on the GPL package, and rest knowing that you KNOW what is in the code, and don't have to deal with the unknowns of proprietary Microsoft code.

From BOTH directions, it's FUD and propoganda, and either way there is risk of a trojan horse getting slipped into the code. With open source code, you have the opportunity to grab the source, download it, and compile it yourself - then you can be reasonably sure that all obvious security holes have been prevented. If you're of the CYA mindset, you choose Microsoft and when something bad happens, you point the finger at Gates, and since Microsoft is an established and well-respective company, your head won't roll.

Me? I am all for picking the right tool for the job. Don't take a round peg, cram it into a square hole, and claim that it's a perfect fit. The user is a TOTAL novice? Linux probably isn't right in 99% of those cases - Mac, then Windows, then Linux would probably be the best order to recommend platforms for such users. The user wants to do a lot of gaming, online banking and trading, etc? Then Windows is probably the best choice - but because it's 90% of the marketplace, you will need antivirus, spyware removal, and other utilities. The reason is this: it is the most prevalent platform, so that's what tends to be targeted.

Blanket statements simply don't work (oops, this is one, sorry, my bad!)

To claim that GPL is 100% safe and trustworthy is misleading.

To claim that it's better to trust {Microsoft | Apple | Sun | other} because they (presumably) pay people to put the code through QA cycles is misleading - and misguided. You wouldn't believe the lack of competence of just basic computer literacy skills that many so-called quality assurance engineers exhibit. I'm not referring to usability testing, where you WANT some novices, but in the actual QA team where testing core components of products (GUI, functional, back-end, etc.) is done. You also wouldn't believe how many known fatal defects that many products have, and product management decides to ship the thing anyway, not considering that it is nearly always cheaper to delay a release and prevent irate customers than to deal with firefighting and spin control when you risk losing a huge software deal because you knowingly shipped poop.

netstat -tap|grep LISTEN
ps -ef|grep AMEX


No, hence the above.


Yep WIN 200 source code got stolen & spread on OPenFT.



I never said that. I did say that Security is never 100%.

Richard Stallman.



Blasphemer! Idolater! Pagan! Oh,never mind, just kidding

hari_seldon99, you missed the point. I was basically taking each side's argument and poking holes through each - because while each side has valid points, this is not a perfect world, and exploits exist and will always exist in some fashion in both proprietary and open source packages -- and to completely discount the validity of using open source or proprietary software based on such blanket statements is to ignore reality.

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I do not disagree with you at all. Open source software does have vulnerabilities. My point is not "Open Source software is better than Proprietary Software." My point is that the "Open Source development model is inherently superior to that of proprietary organisations as far as security is concerned (at least)."
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[p]

This is so because vulnerabilities are more quickly reported and patched in the decentralized network of open source developers worldwide. The open-source development model permits millions of developers to work in a decentralized fashion & still produce results quickly and efficiently. Microsoft has to hide all the source code and lock it up in a vault in Redmond. So all of it's developers have to be sworn in and kept physically in one cage to work. WE cannot scrutinize their code for flaws except by their results, which are usually crappy. Open-Source developers can patch bugs in the codes of other open-source developers simply by downloading from cvs servers using a PDA at starbucks if needed. As further examples, when ddos attacks first started to emerge in the internet, one of the nastiest ones was the ICMP attack called the ping-of-death. Linux patches that tackle this came out in a matter of hours after the problem was reported. Microsoft, with all it's money and resources and fake glamor, took six MONTHS to launch a windows update patch for the POD. Also, the recently reported IDN vulnerability in web browsers have been fixed using a Firefox extension, while vulnerabilities for Internet Explorer reported months ago have yet to be fixed. Proprietary software has to be designed by a medeival mind-set of isolated teams closely guarding their code.
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[p]


Small degenerate teams of developers cannot, statistically, equal the productivity of small-to-moderate teams of developers who work together in a decentralized way, and that can only be done if the source code is accessible to all.
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