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TCP/MS, We'll Cure What Ails You
Cringely can string some words together from time to time, and this week's installment is a pretty good one. He's been reading a little too much Gibson (raw sockets have nothing to do with the spread of MSTD [?] 's), but overall, he's probably right. When the time is ripe, I think we'll see a move exactly like this.
This is true, I have NO IDEA what Cringley is saying when he says that raw sockets allow for more viruses and such to be introduced to your system.
For the uninitiated...
Generally, when programming, you define a great many things when defining a socket, the layer of abstraction to tcp/ip defining a single connection.
SOCK_RAW is a bit less abstract, you define more of the data that is being used by hand rather than allowing for the socket code to do it for you. Generally the you use SOCK_STREAM of SOCK_DGRAM, which define TCP and UDP sockets, respectively. SOCK_RAW writes directly to IP, so you must encode many of the headers manually rather than automatically, as the other 2 would do, and then write them to this socket.
In other words, it has NOTHING to do with getting viruses! SOCK_RAW is just another socket, but you are writing to the IP protocol, rather than TCP or UDP (which sit on top of IP). It also has nothing to do with being DoS attacked. I have NO CLUE where he got that from.