Windows bashing was: Re: Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Tony Baechler]

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OK, we're getting way off topic here, so this will be my only response on
this thread.  My comments are below.

On 5/9/2013 5:54 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> First, the fact that Windows gets viruses is a user issue, not a
> Windows vs Linux issue. with UAC it's a lot harder and if the user runs
> as something besides admin it's even harder still. Those "pesky popups"
> come up because well, your pesky users are actually viewing porn with a
> horrible browser.

That's somewhat true, but not totally.  First, I don't have a virus
scanner or firewall running here.  GASP!  Yep, I ran Windows 98 and XP
with no virus scanner, malware remover or firewall.  You know, I've never
had an active virus on my system.  The last time I had a real and true
virus was after I got a new install of Win98 and the computer shop who
built it installed a virus for me.  It was a rogue process running a
backdoor ftp server and calling itself notepad.  I couldn't figure out why
I always had notepad running in the background.  Once I got that cleaned
up, oh, about 10 or mor years ago, I've not had a virus since.  However,
with OE in particular, it opens email attachments without the knowledge of
the user, so it's next to impossible to prevent getting a virus at some
point.  Thunderbird is better, but you still have to turn off the message
preview by hand.  Eudora would automatically save and open attachments
unless you turned it off.

What's not totally true is your comment about people who view porn and get
pop-ups.  Well, first of all, I don't view it.  I have no interest.
Second, I'm totally blind so there would be no point.  I still get pop-up
ads all the time in IE since it has no blocker, but I hear that IE 7 is
better about this.  I also get them with Firefox 19, but not often.
Sendspace is the really bad one and the Firefox blocker doesn't seem to
block it.  Another one is sfsite.com.  As you say, it's not a Windows vs.
Linux issue.

> There are alternative solutions such as Firefox and Chrome which are
> much better  suited to acting as a browser.

See above.  I only use Firefox here.  Does Chrome work with Orca nowadays?
 Yes, I know Google built their own Chrome screen reader, but I wasn't
impressed with it.  Also, sometimes people have good reasons to use IE,
like stupid government sites requiring it.  I know the DMV is one.  Some
banks still require IE as well.  Some content can't be viewed with other
browsers.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "manually finding keys that don't belong 
> there." If you were worth your weight in whatever people were paying
> you for this random manual registry key removal, you would've used a
> registry cleaner like CCleaner and been done with it. As to anti virus
> solutions, I routinely install them for people and they still have the
> resources to spare, funny enough. Perhaps you should've done more
> research there as well.

Yeah, that's pretty funny.  When I ran a virus scanner here at one time,
also many years ago, it took so many resources that it was hard to get
anything else done.  Literally, my machine came to a complete stop every
morning at 8 AM for five minutes.  Norton managed to lock up the system
completely after it was installed and doing its routine virus check.
Don't get me started on Zonealarm and spyware removers.  While I agree
with you about a registry cleaner, that doesn't remove everything.  After
Mcafee was completely uninstalled because it was a trial and we weren't
going to buy it, the registry had a lot of keys left which I manually had
to find and delete.  That only took me about 30 minutes or so.

You think you're a big shot programmer because you know php or something,
but it's amazing to me how many programmers don't seem to know the basics
of system administration, regardless of the OS.  I guess that's what keeps
security professionals employed full-time.  Just to be fair, I don't
totally agree with Kyle either and I think he makes too many general
assumptions based on his own preferences which are not always true.  Not
everyone runs Arch, for example.  His prices to build a computer are
unrealistic.
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