Im going to try SUSE. 6668

On Monday 05 December 2005 03:02, Marcello stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Windows has you thinking of filesystems as individual enbreasties with the simply regard the hard disk as an integral part of the computer, i.e. "you store files on the computer" without having to know where.

The only two things you can write to are your$HOMEdirectory and - if the system was set up this way - any removable devices under *-mnt.*

Exactly, and this is definitely insecure. An unprivileged user should not have the right to mess with system files, system directories or anything pertaining to the system's configuration.

Oh, and by the way, they are not "folders", they aredirectories. Even Microsoft used to call them that until Windows 3.1, where they took on the term "folder" after how things are called in the Apple MacIntosh environment.

A directory is a directory. A folder can be either a file or a directory.

It's dangerous enough. Compromising your local system is the start to compromising the entire network. If an unprivileged user can do so, then so can malicious computer code.

See above... ;-)

Then you are wrong. If you can install software as a regular, unprivileged user, then so can malware install itself on your machine.

And you may not care about one virus more or less on your computer, but the people all over the world who get targeted by that virus in a Distributed Denial of Service attack or by the virus's tendency to replicate and distribute itself really do care.

As an example, here's a short tale... My organization's e-mail was long handled by an administrator whose ego was far larger than his skill, and after he was fired, I became the postmaster. The domain was set up with a "catch all", which means that any e-mail sent to a non-existing e-mail address in our domain would end up in my mail box.

As a result, I got about five to ten spam mails every day. And then suddenly there was this big outbreak of a virus of some kind - I don't remember which one as I don't use Windows and I don't care about such matters - and all the spammer's Windows PC's had become infected, leading to some 180 spam e-mails per day being sent to bogus addresses in our domain - and hence to my Inbox - which all carried the virus(es) as an attachment.

Some of those mails were masked as fakepostfixreject mails, others were "more personalized" and a great deal of them were typical spam mails.

Now of course, you could tell me to set up a spamfilter - which we did, along with an anti-virus filter - because some of our people were using Windows on their own machines - and I dropped that "catch all" set-up altogether. But that's not the point.

Those e-mails were being sent to our domain nevertheless, and God knows to how many other domains. They were generating a lot of Internet traffic, they were increasing the load to ISP's and they were with great certainty infecting lots of Windows machines from unsuspecting users.

Windows isn't exactly the most secure operating system in the world, but it's a crying shame the way Microsoft sets it up by default to bypbutt even the little security provisions it does have and allow everyone to do whatever they please with the system...

... or at least... for as long as it's not making a copy of the software, redistributing the software or installing it on more than one

Ubuntu is not restrictive. They have chosen for a secure set-up, and there is lots of information out there on how to set up the root account so that it can be logged in to directly again.

For the record, I'm not on Ubuntu myself, and I'm not even usingsudo. Yet, I have set up my system so that the root account cannot log in directly, either at the local console or viassh. One must log in via a normal user account and then usesu- which is only allowed to members of thewheelgroup.

That means that anyone attempting to break in would have to know *two* pbuttwords *plus* the login for my user account.

I don't mean to insult you, but let's say that your opinions were indeed erroneous - the result of years of thinking "the Microsoft way".

Microsoft Windows may have the monopoly in the desktop computer market, but there are more markets out there than the desktop, and eveninthe desktop market, there are multiple other operating systems.

Microsoft has not set any standards. They just have people believing that they do. It's high time the people start disconnecting Microsoft's vision of what a computer is and what it's supposed to do from what a computer *really* is and what it's *really* supposed to do.

Hope this helps... ;-) -- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)