Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The answer is because you’ll probably want to interact with Windows users at some point. That’s right; if you’re a Linux user you really don’t need to run any anti-virus system for your own personal use or protection. You’re not going to get a Microsoft Word macro virus. You’re not going to be hit by any of the headline virus outbreaks over the years.
You might, though, receive jokes from family and friends that you want to pass on – to people running Windows. You might store files on a Samba server, accessed by Windows clients. You may run a POP server for Windows machines.
Each of those Windows clients is potentially at risk of infection by any virus, and wouldn’t it be rotten if you were the one who they got it from? On the one hand it seems rough that you ought to go out of your way for the benefit of others but on the other hand it is part of being a good netizen. In the past I’ve referred to Linux systems that host and pass on viruses as being just like Typhoid Mary. She walked around and infected 47 people with typhoid. She carried the disease but did not actually suffer any adverse affects from it herself.
In the same way, a Linux system that passes on a virus, despite not being itself harmed, is a peddler of pestilence. Perhaps I’m being overdramatic, but I personally would be dismayed to learn someone had been afflicted by a virus which passed through my network without detection or flagging.
Why Windows is so vulnerable harks back to what I was just saying; in stark contrast to Linux, Microsoft Windows users have always been accustomed to logging in with full administrative privileges. Third-party software vendors aren’t blameless; so many applications refuse to install or work correctly unless operated as the administrator user. I’ve seen bad programs which carelessly open a static configuration file for read and write – despite the fact they don’t ever actually need to write to the file – and then, because the configuration file is stored in C:\Program Files the user requires elevated privileges; a non-administrative user can’t write to this directory. When the software’s help desk was called their trite solution was “make sure the user is a local administrator.” Still, within nary two clicks of a mouse this company went into liquidation but it’s one of many examples.
Obviously Linux software must be installed somehow, too. And some applications write to directories and configuration files. Imagine if the program which handled incoming electronic mail couldn’t store its data anywhere! Yet, the difference is by design. From the beginning Linux was built with the concept that nominated programs could run as the super-user, but only programs explicitly designated so. And ordinary users could temporarily become the super-user for the purpose of installing new programs. This is so entrenched, predominantly through the use of the sudo command, that Linux users know to only elevate privileges where required and for the duration of a single command at a time.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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