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Subject : Re: LUG: Most computer users need Linux

From : Warren Myers <volcimaster@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:59:11 -0400

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Jay - those are all applications which operate in the same fashion on all supported platforms :)

Enough picking nits, though: the point of the article, I think, wasn't made - it was hinted-at.

"People" don't need a computer: they "need" a device that can do a few things they want to do (games, email, whathaveyou). If the Kindle or Nook handled email (like the iPad does), I'd venture to say that it would serve the vast majority of PC owners - and any games they want to play can either be on their console of choice, or on the small screen.

Folks like us are anomalies: I routinely utilize multiple `screen` sessions on servers, and Places on my Mac, and virtual desktops on my Linux workstations.

How many "people", though (the ones who go to Walmart and buy the one on sale in the aisle that includes a monitor for 400$) do anything close to that?

My dad works day-in and day-out in Excel very very heavily. The most number of applications I've ever seen running at once on any machine he uses is 5: Excel, Outlook (at work), IE (Firefox at home), Spider Solitaire, the scanner console.

-Warren

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Jay Goel < jpgoel@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:
I don't really want to get caught up in this flame war, but in CSC 405 (security, [1]) we are using password-cracking tools, running well-known exploits, and even writing our own shellcode injection scripts. We're studying and explaining why and how these different things work.

Any takers on which platform has so many security flaws that we can spend a semester exploiting them in this class?

Someone tell me, in this article, where the "explanation" of security is? The only thing this article says is that linux has better default configurations. Except for svn's default behavior to cache your password [2], Firefox's default of URL completing all of your webpages and history - not to mention that javascript+history+link color exploit that's been around for a decade, or that pidgin doesn't even try to encrypt your passwords on the disk [3] not to mention the fact that linux still isn't smart enough to handle an unprivileged user's execution of "for(;;) fork()". RHEL doesn't even come with quotas turned on by default, which will screw up your computer in like 2 seconds.

Sheesh. Y'all have successfully trolled me! Hopefully some of you will come out to Mike Torto's rPath talk today, I'm kinda excited about it!