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Re: FW: Careful. This is for information only.




Did you see this yet? 

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html

Was going around one of my local mailing lists.  Pretty scary read.

Thus spake Craig Dickson (crdic@yahoo.com):

> 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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:wq!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert L. Harris                |  Micros~1 :  
Senior System Engineer          |    For when quality, reliability 
  at RnD Consulting             |      and security just aren't
                                \_       that important!
DISCLAIMER:
      These are MY OPINIONS ALONE.  I speak for no-one else.
FYI:
 perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'



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