[conspire] (forw) Re: linux & viruses

[Heather Stern]

> > You return again to your philosophy of "people will get burned a few
> > times and then they'll learn" without recognizing that a hacked system
> > harms many more people than just the person whose box got hacked.

[That's "cracked" as in broken into, not "hacked" as in left some
amusing proof of programming prowess and logician's torture.]

Slippery slope, coming up.  Computer viruses don't care who you are, and
are almost never about a person or group securing personal control of
your system.  

I struggle for an analogy that works here.  Viruses spread without
conscience, and mostly without enough programming clue to know when to
stop.  They are weeds taking over your garden, not brats breaking into
your house.  As such, there are well known gardener's tricks for dealing 
with weeds, and anyone who allows computer viruses to run rampant (in 
other words, automatically for any reason) is assumed not to know any 
better.  In the MSwin platform there are a pile of companies trying to
sell you defenses;  you'd really have to be living under a rock for a 
few years to not have heard of at least one of them.  In the world of Linux, 
you've got to deliberately lower your original defenses to get even a 
noticeable, much less a major weed infestation - and you're in more danger 
of cutting your hand on your own gardening tools than of finding that the 
backyard flowers are overgrowing your good spot on the couch, beating all 
your Nintendo scores, and ordering triple anchovy pizza on the interest 
using your credit card  :)
 
If you've been deliberately targetted by someone that's another matter
entirely, but then it's not about viruses anymore.

> Not relevant to the discussion.  To quote
> http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#virus2 :
> 
>    It is simply not possible to create and run a piece of software
>    sophisticated enough to prevent a root user from running scripts, system
>    commands, interpreted programs, or any of myriad non-virus executables
>    having destructive potential equal to or greater than that of any virus.

The relevant quote to this is a reminder of philosophy:

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
would also stop you from doing clever things.
		-- Doug Gwyn

And that's quite enough about viruses versus clumsy root users, being
too clever by far to indulge in the finer points of logic.

Ob strunk: I reserve "virii" for biological agents.
Ob authoritative basis:  my first professional use of Linux was training 
   fellow antivirus support techs about PC Unix variants.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
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