“Windows®. Life without Walls™”… but still trapped inside crooked Windows - locked with DRM, falling apart but patched continuously, with no privacy and state of the art spyware monitoring 24-7, hands tied by adware, fed buckets of worms through backdoors and sanitised with antivirus daily. Ah, and yes, right, life without (fire)walls. You are to upgrade to better and even more secure Windows regularly. And we will tell you how to look through the Windows, you can’t change nothing. Any attempt to open the Windows will be considered a very serious offense.
Do you call this life? Get a real life, people. Get Linux!
rotfl!rotfl!rotfl!
PS. Feel free to elaborate on the topic as your imagination permits, I just couldn’t help myself when I saw that slogan.
linuxoidoz wrote:
>… falling apart but patched continuously,
Most OSes are patched continuously now so why is windows different?
> no privacy and state of the art spyware monitoring 24-7,
My windows boxes have privacy and no spyware, not sure what everyone
else is doing to have those issues.
> hands tied by adware,
Haven’t seen adware in years.
> fed buckets of worms through backdoors and sanitised with
> antivirus daily.
Nor have I seen these either in years.
> Ah, and yes, right, no (fire)walls either. Do you call
> this life?
Huh? There is a built in firewall to every version from XP on iirc. If
you are saying you can run linux boxes without a firewall go right ahead
but you set yourself up for things you just complained about happening
in windows.
walla299 wrote:
> “Life Without Walls”, eh? I certainly don’t call it “life!”
>
> My memories (or is it nightmares) of life with Windows:
>
> 1. reinstalling every few months because it screwed itself up all by
> itself.
>
Same thing in linux if you don’t know how the system works.
> 2. The B.S.O.D. (Blue Screen of Death)
>
Fewer and furtherer between now. Not like the days of XP.
> 3. Viruses, Spyware, and all the other “fun” stuff.
>
As opposed to backdoors, rootkits and other fun stuff.
> 4. Antivirus/Anti-Malware programs hogging up so much of my system’s
> memory/resources . . . how much is left for -actually doing something-
> productive?
>
My AV uses less resources/memory than my wireless connection program
that came with my HP. Malware program uses about the same as
Thunderbird. I guess you are right, it is hard to be productive.
> 5. DRM, being treated like a criminal while paying for the
> “priviledge.”
>
What actual DRM are you effected by that makes you feel like a criminal?
> 6. The virus or something that ate my system the evening before that
> presentation was due! (Thank God for backups!!)
>
The wrong command, rootkit or bad kernel update that happened the
evening before that presentation was due.
> 7. I’ll stop here – I really don’t want to get off on a rant!
>
>
My main point is that there are issues with all OSes.
My point was to elaborate on dual meaning of the words in a humorous way, :sarcastic: and NOT to start comparing and arguing pros & cons again and again and again… Don’t you have a sense of humor, people?
The XP “firewall” is a ludicrously bad joke and certainly doesn’t deserve the name. It doesn’t even have outbound monitoring, so any apps can happily phone home, as well as any spyware/trojan/etc. On top of that, it has holes like a swiss cheese.
Vista/Win7 firewall (pretty much the same) isn’t that much better and fails at badly at most leaktests.
That is why they turned back from calling their window “VISTA” to now “Win7”:).
Because people did not recognize, that there are no more windows in their walls…or vice versa…:P?
But are you really sure, that they call win “Windows”, because there are only windows in the house? Here only seven? If I count my windows here, I get a bigger number of them. This could be called: Restictet sight. You can only watch, what they let you see…?
Further more, it would mean, that there can’t be a roof. And without a roof, it might get cold and wetrotfl!
Most software is patched. This has little to do with the OS. However, Windows is known for patching but not fixing.
It’s not impossible to be with out spyware, but then the average user doesn’t know about safe browsing. You are comparing apples to oranges, which is coming off antagonistic
Again, alot of this can be avoided by good safety practices, however, the average Joe doesn’t know or do this, so this is still quite prevalent today.
Most security experts do not recommend the built in Microsoft firewall, where as Cisco uses the Linux firewall. Huge difference. Again, comparing apples to oranges.
You are right, most software is patched. Especially now since it is the new attack vector. So it wouldn’t be an OS thing really which makes the original point moot.
I would disagree. The average user mostly does some banking, checks email and light web browsing. These browsing habits are usually safe and will not yield any spyware. You can go to those same nefarious sites on linux/bsd/os x and be effected, it just depends on if there spyware is attacking an application like firefox or not.
Again, alot of this can be avoided by good safety practices, however, the average Joe doesn’t know or do this, so this is still quite prevalent today.
So basically, as it seems you are saying that the issue is with the user, not the technology. If the user knows no better they get full of viruses, spyware, etc. In that case then the complaint from the OP shouldn’t attack the OS it is prevalent on but the users that use it.
Most security experts do not recommend the built in Microsoft firewall, where as Cisco uses the Linux firewall. Huge difference. Again, comparing apples to oranges.
So would you rather a user use no firewall at all? Cisco using linux as a firewall would be as you said comparing apples to oranges since they are a business and have nothing to do with an OS specific vulnerability. Personally I would rather see a not so informed windows user use the built in firewall, no matter how small or bad protection there is then none at all.
Off topic but I have been wondering who pallidium is By his helpfull and numerous replies I figure he must be pretty high up
file:///tmp/moz-screenshot.png found out who he/she is here is his profile;) Palladium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yeah, I wouldn’t know exactly but my guess is that not running as admin would probably block or mitigate at least 90% of the security issues associated with Windows.
This isn’t of course just the fault of the users. When Microsoft moved people from Windows 95/98/ME to the NT-based systems with the release of XP, a system that supported accounts with different privileges, it could have forced least-privilege on its user-base but it didn’t because it would have broken lots of it’s own code as well as third-party code. It has since seen the light and apparently is working towards a future system where a true standard user will be the default i.e. not the current admin with approval prompt on Vista and W7. Latter doesn’t accomplish much aside from force third-parties to clean up their code to run well on standard user accounts. If you look at their figures they have been fairly successful at this which means that users can do most normal activities using a standard account when using W7 if they get a clue and go to the trouble of creating and using a standard account.
E-week ran a test back in 2005 using two clean XP SP2 machines. They logged in as admin on one and standard use on the other then browsed a selection of scummy websites. The results were pretty dramatic. When scanned nothing was found on the machine used in standard user mode but the admin machine had thousands new registry entries and hundreds of new files. More recently BeyondTrust found that running as non-admin blocked or mitigated the majority of serious Windows security bugs in 2008.
However you look at it, and regardless of the OS you are using, if you run with administrative privileges without a compelling reason you need your head examined. Windows is a security mess because most programs were written in the assumption that they would run on admin accounts and users and coders alike live in a culture in which running as admin is normal. It’s like a crack addiction.
