Spyware becomes increasingly malicious

Wed Jul 14 20:12:13 UTC 2004

Ok.. but has BSD been attacked on the scale that MS code has? I would argue
no, not even close. Do you believe BSD is invulnerable to attack? Hardly..
Unless you want to go back to text based browsers and kernals that fit on a
floppy, it is extermely difficult to eliminate all vulnerabilities in the
code of a sophisticated OS. The more complex the system, the easier it is to
break, and with the level of automation currently expected by most users,
this requires a very complex build.
Could MS be made more secure, of course. Do I think they are actively
working on the problem, yes. If Novell or Mac had risen to the top of the OS
heap, would they be catching all the viruses now? I think they would.
Really, my point was not to argue this, but that there is no justification
for malicious code, that you can't simply pawn it off on MS as being the
real problem. By doing that, you are saying that people creating spyware and
viruses are not culpable for their actions, that they should be allowed to
create havoc and destroy systems, because really they are only leveraging
'features' built into the operating system.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Niels Bakker" <niels=nanog at bakker.net>
To: <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: Spyware becomes increasingly malicious

>
> >> Sorry, it was a _technical_ question - is MAC OS known as having pests
> >> and ad-ware in the comparable numbers (if any)?
>
> * stepnwlf at magma.ca (John Underhill) [Wed 14 Jul 2004, 19:45 CEST]:
> > This is spurious logic. You are suggesting that Mac is a more secure
> > operating system, and I would suggest that it is probably far less
> > secure, because it has not had to withstand years of unearthing
> > vulnerabilities in the code.
>
> It has.  Darwin is based on years of development in BSD code.
>
>
> -- Niels.
>
> -- 
> Today's subliminal thought is: