Re: A question for the group

Ken Smith wrote:
In article <44ab6d79$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
A real firewall/router will cost about $30, and do a vastly better job of protecting your network or PC from trojans and other nasties.

They don't protect you from trojans. Trojans are named after that Greek horse that the idiots in Troy downloaded to inside their firewall.


You are correct - I used the wrong term. They protect you against worms, and direct attacks. The best protection against trojans is using your brain.

And your ISP should be able to virus-scan your emails for you - again,

I want my ISP to keep its hands off my e-mails. We really don't want the status of ISPs to be changed. Today, very like the phone company, they are not responsible for what is said over their system. I want ISPs to keep this protection.


In general, that's true - but most offer a decent spam and virus filtering service on their mail servers.

they will (should!) do a better job than a home system.

As far as I know, there are no viruses for Apples. I think that this is in part because they are very well defended. The problem with the PC is that its software has a history that extends back to when "everything can be trusted". Microsoft has to make the new stuff work with the old software but somehow also make it protected against malware. This isn't an easy task even if it is given higher priority that animating that stupid paperclip.



There are viruses for Apples, just as there are viruses for Linux, BSD, and other *nixes. But they are very rare, and have never been a serious issue (there have been a couple of worms that were more serious, but not for a long time). Backwards compatibility is not the main problem with windows (after all, most *nix systems have lots of ancient software as well), but as you say prioritising is a big part of the problem. MS aims solidly for "easy to use" - regardless of whether that also means "easy to break". Windows users run with administrative rights, since it is far easier that way - *nix users run with limited rights, and therefore any malware they get hold of will have limited effect. Windows was always aimed at closed systems (single computers, then closed networks), so security was an afterthought, while *nix was used in the most hostile computer environments on earth (university labs) while BG was still searching dustbins for sample code to steal.

Of course, there is the aspect that there are more windows machines out there, and thus it's a bigger target, but the windows malware market is far out of proportion compared to the *nix malware market.
.

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