How to get down off a duck ( why Linux is inherently more secure than Windows.)

A Man and His Penguin ^ | Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:32 am | bigbolshevik

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

As promised, this is an article about why Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. I don’t promise that it’s 100% accurate down to the last detail; in fact, I have purposely simplified many details, and left out some more complex topics. I apologise about the length, too; it’s rather long, but I hope it’s interesting reading for people who are new to Linux as well as those who have not properly tried the Linux platform yet.

———-
In an earlier article “How to get down off an elephant”, I described why
Windows viruses don’t infect Linux systems, and why you don’t need to
worry about viruses when you move to Linux. Quite rightly I got picked
up on what I didn’t mention: Viruses written for Linux.

In this article, I’ll explain why Linux viruses are so few and far
between, and why they are really not worth worrying about at this time.

There are always people around who will claim that the only reason why
there are so few (no?) Linux viruses is because Linux isn’t particularly
wide-spread. They say that if Linux was as popular as Windows, then
there would be as many Linux viruses as there are currently Windows
ones.

I would combat that allegation. Linux is very widely used on
Internet-facing servers. As such, it is the guardian of credit card
details, passwords, social security numbers, and even industrial
secrets. What would be more valuable: Pulling information from a
desktop computer containing Granny’s shopping list, or intercepting a million
credit card numbers being sent from ATMs to a Linux server? Or finding
the blueprints of Boeing’s latest wing design, to sell to
Lockheed-Martin or Airbus?

[TiberiusClaudius]

You took one look, got huffy over a political difference and then whined and cried over its age!?

No, I did take the time to read most of several chapters, although the Reagan reference was flippant. The C++ stuff was so obviously out of date (eg pre-STL), that I went and checked the t copyright date. So, as a technicaly guide, its almost useless, although I suppose that as a historical reference, there is some value there.

Your code example is more a C issue than a C++ one.

[AFreeBird]

Wow, I had forgotten all about Deskview/X. Yea that could work.

[killermosquito]

I’m not attempting to hijack the thread but you seem like a great person to ask. I have an old PC that I’m thinking of putting linux on but I am currious to know if it would be a waste of my time. It is a Dell Pentium II 300 MegaHertz with 192 Megs of RAM. Any suggestions?...JD

[BuckeyeTexan]

It depends on what your objective is. Sure, you could load a Linux distro on it, although it might be painful.

If you want to learn about Linux and understand more about drivers, (and possibly recompiling the kernel?) go for it. You’ll struggle enough with the exercise that you’ll actually learn a few things: what not to do, where to find stuff, etc.

If you want to use the system for every day purposes, don’t waste your time.

[BuckeyeTexan]

Yes, anything critical runs on “real” UNIX, like AIX. (I sure hope you don’t mean SCO UNIX.)

But for most small to medium size webservers (that make up a significant majority of the Net), Linux is their first choice. (That and Apache, MySQL, and PHP.)

Yes, I know the Net has move beyond LAMP now, but enough of it still exists to call it “classic.”

[OneWingedShark]

Ok, how about C++’s [lack] of inheritance.

There’s no constructor inheritance!
Also, the private/protected/public access specifiers are implemented in a more “source-code”-al way instead of on the conceptual level.
And the way in which it handles inheritance is disgusting, more like defining some interface than actually inheriting something.