Stan Beer
Saturday, 10 November 2007 19:53
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
For any parent, myself included, setting your kids loose on the net is a daunting prospect. We have to do it because the net is a fact of life - it's in our schools, the workplace, public libraries and in many if not most homes of the developed world. Therefore, do we really have any option but to give them Linux?
When I first conceived this article I considered
giving it the title "can we afford to let our kids use Windows online".
However, I felt that taking a positive tack would be more constructive.
The fact is that these days security is paramount with kids surfing the
net, exchanging emails and chatting online while still in primary
school.
Having recently migrated to Ubuntu from Windows, I fully appreciate the
risks that our kids are exposed to everytime they venture online with
Windows. Basically, kids online are an accident waiting to happen,
regardless of what anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware they happen to
be running.
Every other day, some anti-malware vendor issues a media release about
a zero day attack of a new worm or Trojan horse that has slipped under
the guard of known anti-malware signatures. At least once a month - and
quite often more frequently - we hear of critical vulnerabilities in
Windows whatever the version that require software patching. Microsoft
freely admits that exploits for these vulnerabilities could hand
control of a computer to a remote attacker. Sometimes exploits are
already in the market before patches arrive.
In addition, the anti-malware penicillin that Windows computers are
required to run these days just to keep the online experience
moderately safe are so resource hungry that computers thousands of
times as powerful as the primitive number crunchers that put men on the
moon nearly 40 years ago are as slow as a wet week. My highly
configured dual core processor computer with 4GB of RAM and a powerful
dedicated graphics processor running Windows Home Server 2003 ran
slower than a much weaker computer I had in the pre-Internet late 1980s
running DOS.
Most average computer users, myself included, would not have a clue
which is the best security package to run on our Windows computers. We
tend to go with the names we know Symantec/Norton, McAfee, CA,
Kaspersky, Microsoft, but we don't really know what will happen if we
open an attachment in a dodgy email or click on a link that leads to a
malicious web page. Maybe our security package will capture and
quarantine the deception or maybe not. It's the one time in a hundred
that slips under the guard of these security packages that can do all
the damage and with our kids that's not good enough.
