Re: FW: Careful. This is for information only.
Robert L. Harris wrote:
> You'd think within 12 days people would figure out how to download and
> install a service pack. Kinda scary how long this has been going on
> in the first place.
Indeed. The basic problem, I think (not that this is anything terribly
revelatory), is that the Internet is really not a safe place for people
who don't understand computers well enough to protect themselves, and
Microsoft has never really made security their primary concern. Not that
they're alone in that; a default Red Hat Linux installation runs all
kinds of potentially vulnerable services that the average home user
doesn't understand or need. (Nor is Red Hat the only distro with this
problem. Even Debian, which is more conservative than most in this
regard, includes telnetd, fingerd, and identd among the "standard"
packages. My machines run none of these, but only because I went out of
my way to remove them.)
My feeling is that the default workstation configuration for any OS
should have _no_ open ports. No web server, no mail server (just an MTA
configured only for outbound use via the command line), no ftpd, no
telnetd, no sshd, no fingerd, no identd, no file or printer sharing, X11
services configured for local use only, etc., etc., etc. If the user
wants these things, s/he should have to actively select them one by one.
Not that this is any guarantee that the user will know how to manage
them, but it's better than installing everything by default in the inane
goal of giving the user a "feature-packed" system.
Craig
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