Posted on 11/26/2012 11:13:00 AM PST by ShadowAce
I was thinking the same thing. I'm setting up a small business tech system right now, and I'm not going to have anything locally, no files, no applications, nothing except the operating system (right now, Google Chrome). All of the problems cited by the OP are thereby eliminated. Everything's backed up always, hardware failures will always result in zero downtime because there will always be other devices around to log-in from, no software to purchase, no compatibility issues, no malware, viruses, or manual updates. All files are available anywhere out in the field, from all kinds of device, including smartphones and tablets. Yes, it's not "confidential", but the only way to entirely eliminate the possibility of someone seeing your files is to stay off the internet completely (at least on the computer in question) and a computer not connected to the internet in 2012 makes about as much sense to me as a cell phone without a voice and data plan.
That makes sense.
This is great if your software requirements are vanilla, I suppose. If all we are talking about is Office type documents than fine. But good luck if you have any special needs as a business. Most of this article is generalized, self important claptrap.
Ha ha! My first thought exactly. Fearless Fosdick. No school like the Old School.
Well, you can see the source. If there is something malicious or bad, everyone familiar with that source in the world would be commenting/complaining about it.
A ticket gets opened, it gets fixed.
Yes, the projects (source) are locked down. It’s not like joe blow edits the master copies of the source files. They have a project team, source control, etc.
They just have the source publicly available for the world to see if they care to.
I like Linus’s comments. Lotsa dopes out there in high places, and he doesn’t mince words. Funny.
With windows, M$ keeps a monstrous stack of poo called their architecture with the source only known to M$.
So you’re relying on M$ to keep it secure and of good quality.
IMHO, they’ve got to be coding what amounts to empty loops to soak up CPU with the speed of today’s CPUs.
If they did a great job at keeping their architecture straightforward, extensible and secure, and they did not overcharge, open source would not really be necessary.
If Windows could be had for $29, and M$ was not trying to throw curve balls to developers and “lock them in” to M$, etc., by always implementing things their own weird way, and they kept configurations secure by default instead of insecure by default, and M$ never entered the applications market in a big way, using their brand name to blow away every application software company they could once their products got popular, they would have an OS platform that made sense to build software on.
But since they don’t do these things, a software company knows that M$ will only let them get so big before they crush them with an M$-branded competitive product (that stinks but will sell anyway) or buy them out for not too great of a price.
They got too big, however, with BG wanting to take over the whole software industry, instead of just run a business and leave it go at that, which leads to the trap of revenue increase addiction despite the fact that they’ve long since grew beyond the natural market size for an OS company. Such an addiction naturally motivates towards monopoly as opposed to efficiency and innovation to bring in more revenue. This is why MSFT share price in the last 10 years has gone - nowhere. It’s got nowhere to go.
And M$ has single-handedly held back innovation for all these years since most people are stuck with whatever Redmond comes up with.
Someday maybe we can get beyond the goofiness that OSs and the internet are today. Thanks to the idiocy of government, I’m in no hurry.
Thought you were using some Linux.
I just want it to work... I don’t want to have a new hobby
Every few years we have to upgrade and it is 3 months of HELL... I would hate to deal with that on a daily basis... fix this, that doesn’t work, my printer doesn’t work etc etc etc
I could write DB Programs myself that did everything except have pretty pictures back during the dos days ... today ... not so much
TT
It has more to do with the target's market share than the sourcing model. Hacking Mac OS when it was 9% of the market share wouldn't make news. Hackers went after Windows because that made news. Interestingly, now that Mac OSX is getting to he 30% share, it is coming under attack. In the mobile space, Android is the market leader. So it gets teh attention target on its back.
The difference is that Android's internals are open for analysis. Yes, there is a large, faster moving community that is evolving the code base quicker than a big company minded Microsoft. But there is also opportunity for someone to find adn exploit the hole rather than fix it. This was exactly what happened with the Android game malware that sent your contacts adn personal information to a server in China a year or so ago. And that fast moving dynamic is changing as well under Google, who is becoming the big company minded beast. They will become "the man" to the economic politics driven hacker. And to the attention seeking hacker.
My comment on merging sources was that unless you personally review source changes to both the OS and the apps you use (compiling them all locally), you are placing some implicit trust in the open source community. Nothing more.
It is a matter of where you personally want to place trust and accept risk. Just don't be lulled into believing the open source community is fully trustworthy - remember, many of the Windows hackers are part of the open source community.
A ticket gets opened, it gets fixed.
If a ticket gets opened, it gets fixed. Or if a hacker finds it first, by reading the code, and exploits it without reporting it, as happened on Android recently.
And the apps go thru no review process at all. There are pluses and minuses to both models. And there is more than on closed source operating system out there. You just have to weight the risks and rewards and make the decision appropriate for you.
Had a hardware crash on a Xp box. Yup, restoring the system is not just making a hard disk swap.
A couple thoughts:
No smartphones for me. I want control, or forget having the device. I don’t want auto updates on anything.
The only way something can get in is if something is listening or malicious code installs itself.
I keep only software that I want installed; my ports are essentially all not listening. And I know for a fact that nothing has changed, so there’s no new software that I don’t know about, no update, etc., that planted itself in my machine and by default is a hacker magnet. I do everything in paranoid mode.
I don’t want to deal with software on a simple device like a phone, then actually conduct personal transactions on it, save personal data on it, etc.
Unix in general is just a pc-like O/S, i.e., the default file systems are primitive. Root can write to executable files. It’s idiotic. It was never intended to be what it is today, that is, having to exist in the free-for-all unsecure world.
I would much prefer that several proprietary OSs were competing and available to give me a choice, but M$ killed all of them off.
Open Source works and it’s cheap. It’s also rinky-tink in terms of arbitrary, cryptic, cutesy naming conventions, commands that have bazillion options for a truckload of functionality in one command etc. TC/IP is nuts, IMHO.
But... at least I’m not paying thousands per year to M$ for the same amount of goofy complexity and having the whole thing change every 5 years or so. M$ is constant BS that one has to pay exhorbitant amounts for. An old executable on linux has a good shot a running.
IMHO, after 50 years, there should be OSs that had the core functions, be rock solid and cheap.
Yeh, I agree 100%, ya pay yer money, ya take yer choice.
What about if you left your Ouija Board in your other suit and can't access the cloud?
Bookmark
That is a common critique but a baseless one in the case of the major open-source enterprise programs like Linux, Apache, etc. Those programs are rock-solid in security.
Narrowing the discussion to only enterprise versions does not include the whole open source world. Having worked in the enterprise server industry for 25 years, I am well aware of where enterprise Linux is and how long it took to get there.
The premise I was addressing was the assertion that open source in and of itself creates more secure solutions. And his reference point was the personal desktop, not the enterprise server. If he must buy one of the enterprise Linux solutions to get the level of security you speak of, the price part of his argument goes out the window.
Yes, where I can. Firewalls/DMZs - that kind of thing.
But - functionally - my employer is a mall, as opposed to a single-purpose business like a law firm. So, while I have just under 300 users, I have 8 primary database systems from different industries. As opposed to Seafirst Bank where we had 1 primary industry database system surrounded by a bunch of secondary systems.
So, I have no flexibility when it comes to software infrastructure.
Which sucks.
Actually, the issues with mobile devices has more to do with the security model they implement. From what I've seen, with most of these devices, users are pretty much running as ROOT, which is a big no-no.
Your ideas about market share being such a large factor has been debunked so many times, I think a few FR posters have macros for it.
Your ideas about market share being such a large factor has been debunked so many times, I think a few FR posters have macros for it.
What is an alternative explanation for Android being a bigger target than iOS? If its not market share related, then what? Is Android inferior to iOS?
And if the market share aspect is not a part of why hackers target a given platform, why do so many former hackers who have gone public say it was? Many relish the notoriety they recieved by making the news. None of them got famous hacking Symbian or OS/2.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.