OT: Nix less secure than Windows.

[Baron Munchausen]

Thermodyne said:
Do your home work, if it gets past one version, it gets past most of them. Take out the Unix and osX and you still have a lot of flaws. The thing that needs to be known here is that Nix is not in and of itself safe. You need to take the same steps as windows users.

No one has claimed that *IX is inherently 'safe'. Many have claimed that it is more secure than Windows. Which is not very difficult to achieve. But I think it's the authors of this study who need to 'do their homework'...

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6021867.html

"The study is confusing and misleading. When you look at the list, the vulnerabilities are miscategorized," Mark Cox, a consulting software engineer at Red Hat, said. "For example, Firefox is categorized as a Unix/Linux operating-system flaw, but it runs just as well on a Windows platform. Apache and PHP also run just as well on both platforms. There are methodological flaws in the statistics."

In addition, Steven Christey, an editor for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, an organization that maintains a common vulnerability database, said that the statistics were no basis for comparison of the relative security of Windows and Linux/Unix, because they had been collected from different sources with different criteria for the collection of flaws.

...

Secunia thought that the nature of the reported vulnerabilities also made it difficult to compare security on the platforms, as Linux/Unix researchers concentrate on vulnerabilities in local privilege separation, while Windows researchers look at possible remote vulnerabilities.

[Fyron]

NullAshton said:
Linux just isn't hacked because Windows is a bigger target. If you hack linux, so what? Windows holds the market share.

If you hack *nix, you get crucial information on lots of huge corporate web sites. Nowhere near as many with Windows.

And yeah, the list does seem to include a lot of beta fixes and the same fix for the same problem in multiple distributions needlessly... Not that useful of a list for basing any claims, other than software is insecure.

And I'd like to know who Thermodyne is talking to that says Linux is secure because it is Linux. Any competent user of Linux is aware of vulnerabilities cropping up. Its insecurities are rarely as severe as Windows ones, but it of course it still has them...

[Arkcon]

Poke around on /., I seemed to see a reference there (or maybe on Groklaw?), that the *Nix numbers are inflated -- the same exploit being listed multiple times.

I just don't care anymore. I'll probably jump in the Vista bandwagon, but only after a couple of years passes, and the price goes down, and I get a new computer.

If I programed, I'd program for Linux. 'Cause I'd only want the genuinely computer literate calling me with problems.