How much longer..

Wed Aug 13 21:18:59 UTC 2003

Well, two things here..

First, UNIX has more than it's share of vulnerabilities. For those of
you who can remember the "HP Bug a day" list?  Or how about the
numerous problems with sendmail or BIND? Sure, all these problems have
been corrected as they've been discovered but I wouldn't wanna take
odds on how many older instances of these programs exist. And the
vulnerabilities still come in for local users from the various OS
vendors. Not to mention various problems with IP stacks and so forth.

For those of you who think this is just a windows problem, think
again. The reason for the severity of impact is simply because of the
pervasiveness of the single OS. You don't find these things under UNIX
simply because it's too hard to make it work. (You have so many
different OS varients, people running different MTA's, web servers,
nameservers, etc, etc.) With Microsoft, it has become so ubiquitous
that it's easy to find 10,000 servers running the same buggy stuff in a
short period of time.

Second: Isn't OS bashing just a bit off topic?

On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 07:48:08PM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Len Rose wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Hi.. just think if the billions of dollars being spent on M$
> > products could have been funneled into open source projects.
> > 
> > To reinforce the point in the most blunt manner possible:
> > 
> > No one had ever better dare postulate that the inherent reason 
> > for all of the vulnerabilities in Micro$oft products are due 
> > to any special features of note. 
> > 
> > There is no particular network-enabled feature that Windows has 
> > that UNIX didn't implement years before and has done so securely 
> > following established internet design standards adopted by the 
> > ruling standards body (IETF) after intense study and open participation
> > from all parties who were interested. 
> > 
> > Now knee-jerk reactions by various network operators is to
> > filter, filter, filter and soon, by the grace of a piece of
> > crap operating system you'll have a much more limited internet
> > to work with because for Micro$oft's sake they've filtered everything.
> 
> Hey I like MS bashing as much as anyone else but the fact is you could say this 
> of any vendor.. a good recent example being Cisco
> 
> 

---
Wayne Bouchard
web at typo.org
Network Dude

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