David Bolt wrote:
On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Clayton wrote:-
<snip>
This does not account for buffer overflow exploits etc...
Of course, there's also those infections that occur without user intervention, but those tend to come in through security holes in server daemons which are unlikely to be running on a normal users desktop system.
The susceptibility of linux vs windows has been pretty well discussed in this thread except for the biggest difference between the two -- the regular security updates from many sources (which we see several times a week on this list) for linux vs the occasional update from Microsoft -- usually too late to help most people. Linux has many people actively working to keep it safe, and Microsoft has a number of people reacting to exploits, although it's been my impression lately that Microsoft is getting more serious about it. I have several dozen updates to my wife's XP Pro machine, of which a fair fraction are security fixes for problems that I haven't seen. Anyone handling their computer responsibly will have no trouble at all in linux, but it requires real paranoia under windows. (My wife uses firefox and thunderbird, and Office97. I'm working on OOO to replace Office, but she's happy with what she has.) Lack of attention, of course, is the real reason so many have trouble, even if they don't know enough to see it, under windows. It's so much easier to maintain a linux machine responsibly, and there's so much more help available. John Perry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org