Conrad Newton wrote:
Up to now, the only formulation that I find reasonably satisfing is the following: Ask a Linux user when he or she last had a virus, and you will encounter only confusion: although security experts agree that Linux _could_ have viruses (in theory), in practice I have never met a Linux user who suffered from one. This seems a little weak, but at least it is honest. Many of the more detailed discussions are completely unusable.
I've been using unix based/inspired operating systems for over ten years, and have never had a virus or trojan (a much more serious problem for linux than viruses). The only case of a virus infecing a *nix box I got second hand from a LUG meeting. Someone with root access to a box logged direcly into it as root, and then used evolution to read their emails and was infected.
In other words, the user screwed up.One thing I've discovered since atrting to work full time with linux is that no-one from a windows background I've met has a grasp on multi-user operating systems. Not surprising given windows single-user background, but that lack of a grasp means that they fail to understand that any genuinely multi-user OS (not just linux) must have a radically different security model than those with single user only, be that operating system windows, BeOS, NeXT or even linux distros such as linspire.
The fact that the Windows security model is inherently flawed is an entirely different topic, and probably not relevant for getting your point across.
BTW, congrats on your recent award. Regards, Ben --On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage