[Servant of the Nine]

This can't be true, Linus Torvalds (the most arrogant S.O.B. I have ever heard speak) has told us time and time again that Linux is "Rock Solid".

What operating system are the FSF servers running?
It could be BSD, or even Windoze!
Just because the Linux source code is stored there doesn't mean thte servers are running it.

Aint nuthin perfect, and aint nuthin that can't be hacked !!

That is for sure true.

So9

[old-ager]

"It could be BSD, or even Windoze!"

Ever heard the expression "grasping at straws" ?

[Criminal Number 18F]

Your comments, I presume, were sarcastic... but in case anybody wonders, here is what www.fsf.org is running. (Linux and Apache -- no surprize there). Thanks to NetCraft where you can learn what any webserver is running. You can also do that, in fact, learn what software net-connected system is running (and many more useful things), with NMap, from insecure.org.

And here is the FSF statement on the crack. There are some very interesting facts buried in there:

• the perpetrator was a local, not net, user.
• the presumed target was passwords
• none of the source on the machine has come up compromised.

It is pessimistic to say that nothing can be cracked. It is quite possible to build a secure Linux. And OpenBSD is secure right out of the box. Mac OSX and OSX Server are also very, very difficult to root in the default install, and they do maintain themselves, Windows XP-style.

"Root, God, what is difference?" - Pitr of UserFriendly.

A lot of end users don't understand the difference between the vulnerabilities of OSS systems and the way these vulnerabilities are addressed, and Microsoft's innately single-user systems and their "security through obscurity" approach. Either system is toast if your admins drop the ball, as FSF did here. But the closed-source system is also toast if the crackers discover an exploit that the maintainers have been hiding so as not to "alarm" the users.

People who have spoken for security for one major closed-source vendor have traditionally come from marketing or PR backgrounds, and been extremely weak on security theory. That's probably all you can do if you build on a feeble architecture.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

[dwollmann]

Just because the Linux source code is stored there doesn't mean thte servers are running it.

The GNU ftp server hosts the source distributions for the GNU software tools, not the Linux kernel itself, which is hosted at ftp.kernel.org.