On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 14:22 -0500, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:
Brian K. White pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 17:33 +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Thursday 05 November 2009 11:52:52 Brian K. White wrote:
What rock have you been living under? The one where you learn how to read.
I did not in any way talk about the differences between open source and closed source, don't try to make my statements out to be some sort of defence of closed source, because all that means is you haven't read what I wrote.
Your arguments hinge on there being essentially no difference between the two, that any problems would exist equally in each, be equally dangerous or not, be equally fixable or not, be equally likely to be fixed or not, on the same time scale. Which is a ridiculous thing to say.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!
The only safe computer is the one that is turned off and locked away in a bank type vault. Can we please end this pissing match and move on?
Oh gee, ludicrous exaggeration outside the bounds of all reality. That's a brilliant debate argument. Almost as good as name-calling. OK I'll play, "There is no such thing as security concerns. Let everyone and everything do whatever they want it's all probably fine, in fact, don't even bother looking." What did that nonsense accomplish, in either direction? You didn't say the grossly exaggerated garbage above any more than I said the grossly exaggerated garbage you did. The original points are valid. It's out of line and irresponsible for anyone to tell anyone else as advice: "ah, don't worry about that it's probably nothing" It's just never anyones place to say that to anyone else. It's like telling someone not to bother locking the door to their house while they're at work, because most neighborhoods are fine and if the crook wants in he's going to get in anyways and that silly doorknob lock really means nothing. Actually, in this case it's more like telling someone not to set any kind of password or wep or wpa key on their home wifi, and not to bother even looking if anyone has been using it or what they've been using it for. Probably no one has poked around and read things off your pc's, probably they aren't sniffing all the traffic and capturing passwords, probably they haven't used your net connection as a nice relay node to do things they wouldn't want traced back to themselves. And most of the time yes probably that's true. That's still a completely irresponsible thing to say to someone else. Because: A) sometimes it's not true B) if everyone did that, then very quickly the bad guys would realise "hey no one locks these" and then almost everyone would be taken advantage of. Any time there is a case where generally no bad guys take advantage of something, it's only because generally it's not available so they aren't looking to try to do something they know most people do not allow them to do. If your neighborhood is good and no one ever tries to break in to the houses, it's only because they know the houses are always locked and maybe have alarm systems too. This means maybe one or a few people can actually get away with leaving their place wide open, because the bad guys have no reason to suspect anyone would ever do that, so they wouldn't notice when one guy does for a while. But if that was the general rule that mostly no one locks their door or sets any alarms? Every place would get cleaned out. So no the sky is not falling , and yet, even though the sky is not falling, you still are obligated to investigate questionable things and close potential doors when you discover them. It's sort of like digital hygiene. If you don't do this you no only open yourself to problems, become a disease vector for everyone around you. (not saying you personally just in general) Saying that the original point is valid is in no way saying the sky is falling. My objection is purely to the broken argument and irresponsible advice that there is no problem at all, and I will continue to say so as long as that bad advice continues to be put forth. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org