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The World's Safest Operating System
fredrikr writes "UK-based security firm mi2g has analyzed 17,074 successful digital attacks against servers and networks. The results are a bit surprising. The BSD OSes (including FreeBSD and Mac OS X) proved to be the systems least likely to be successfully cracked, while Linux servers were the most vulnerable. Linux machines suffered 13,654 successful attacks, or 80 percent of the survey total. Windows based servers enjoyed a sharp decline in successful breaches, with only 2,005 attacks."
There was a paper by Brian Kernighan in the August 1979 Bell Labs Journal that predicted that this would be the case....wonder why everyone is so surprised
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Are you sure that the address for this article wasn't supposed to be http://www.microsoft.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pag eid=http%3A//www.mi2g.net/cgi/mi2g/press/190204_2. php?
At the very least, Microsoft must have paid them to skew the results in their favor. MyDoom, anyone?
But I think a significant portion of the Linux community is so blinded by their zealotry that the fail to realize that their treasured Operating System is not unlike Swiss cheese.
Sad to see Windows way lower, but unfortunately it's true. Sure this thread will be full of folks claiming that this was somehow rigged by Microsoft to slant it their way. Whatever. I just described them in the previous paragraph.
I will continue to run Windows on my Application and File servers, Linux on my web Server, and OpenBSD on my firewall. If anyone here thinks Linux is the magic snake oil to solve all your security and other problems, you're a fucking idiot.
I don't understand why anyone would bother running Linux on a Mac. For $99 you can purchase Mac OS X and get real live tech support for problems that (probably won't) pop up. There's a lot of technical reasons you should run Mac OS instead of Linux.
Linux has its origins on IA32, Intel's 32-bit architecture. Every platform Linux has migrated to since then has been beset with porting problems Linux runs 32% more efficiently on Intel than PowerPC. This is very telling as PowerPC is in general much faster per clock than Intel. Somewhere in the translation from PowerPC to IA32 something got lost.
Mac OS is 100% native for PowerPC. The Mach kernel has been optimized for the G3, G4, and 970 since Apple began writing the operating system back in 1996. Why choose a hacked and kludged OS from another platform when you can have an environment tailor-made for the system you'll be running it on? Mac OS certainly isn't plagued by same driver problems Linux is (in)famous for.
In Linux, the development model is highly irrational: anyone is allowed to submit patches, and one man (Linus Torvalds) sorts through gigabyte after gigabyte of amateurish code, attempting to integrate it into the kernel. Apple's model is much more modern and decisive: the code for the low levels of Mac OS is available for anyone to download and modify, while the more complex parts of the system (QuickTime and OpenGL) are kept closed-source so those that know better the Apple programmers are the only ones allowed to tinker.
The results because of these differing development models are clear. Apple released a major update to the OS once a year, and releases about five minor updates to the OS, as well as several dozen security patches and driver updates, in the interim. Since March of 2001 we've gone from 10.0 to 10.2.5! Linux is still stuck at some sort of bizarre "in-between" 2.5 kernel patch and won't move on to 2.6 until well after Apple has released Mac OS 10.3.
It's not hard to see the difference here is a bunch of kids playing with source code instead of doing their homework vs. highly qualified professionals pushing their skills to the limits. The Mac OS user benefits.
I don't even think I have to touch on this. While Linux offers several GUIs from GNOME, KDE, and Enlightenment, Apple offers only one. But here we have a case of quality vs. quantity. Apple controls the GUI for its operating system while anyone can hack and modify the various Linux GUIs as they please. This has led to a lack of desktop standards and a whole lot of bickering and flame wars over human interface guidelines. Most of the GUIs for Linux are simply poor knock-offs of the Windows 95 interface.
Apple's Aqua and QuickTime graphical interfaces are faster, more elegant, and very consistent. A Mac user can sit down at any Mac and (assuming someone hasn't installed Linux) get right to work. With Linux, it's hit or miss as to whether the user will know what to do when he logs in! Getting work done is the most important aspect of a computer. After all, it is just a tool. Linux fails in this area miserably you're forced to edit and tinker and kludge and hack to make things perfect. A Mac allowes you to just sit down and roll up your sleeves and get some work done. I don't have time to play at my job.
I've used Linux before and the headache of downloading drivers and libraries and making sure the versions all sync up are too mucvh to handle, especiallly considering one has to compile these applications. On a Mac, I mount a disk image and drag the .app file to /Applications, and I'm done. Hell, most software for Mac even installs it there for you.
To put this last point in perspective, let's look at a recent task I perf
I DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE THE HOMOSEXUAL MACUSERS WERE MAKING THIS SHIT UP
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like Howard Dean screaming
I am not saying that your english is funny, i am merely saying that if your english was not funny you couldnt write this :)
Keep smiling!
Tanveer
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
BSD is open, too. It's not about open, it's about a shitty article.
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I guess Open Source "things" are not as good as Microsoft "things"...
Wow, great strategy there, sport. Can't refute the comment? Just attempt a retarded insult!
That's funny, because this one app called explorer always crashes my windows box.
andy
Yeah, too bad the project died.
I was surprised to see CowboyNeal as the poster.If it were Taco or Timothy, I would assume that this is a dupe. This is more Michael's style. Post a troll article. Comment in the discussion. Mod dissent down. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Do you know of a better way to deploy an operating system than using a distribution?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
The SQL slammer worm was an exploit in MS's SQL server, not Windows, and it was one that was patched MONTHS before the exploit made it into the wild. It was the fault of sysadmins that didn't do their fucking job that it got so big (SoBig?). In case you don't remember, MS had issued an alert months before stating that the easiest way to eliminate the possibility of attack was to CLOSE A FUCKING PORT. But there were a few hundred thousand people that didn't bother patching their systems OR closing all non-essential ports (two grounds for dismissal, IMO).
This is NOT a dumbass way to conduct a study. It is a study on the vulnerability of OS's against SPECIFIC attacks, not generalized attacks such as worms. Can you get this through your thick Linux-spooging-on skulls? What we have here is significant evidence of a PROBLEM. Scoff all you want, but this needs to be looked at NOW.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
If I had a nickel for every study that told me it had proven something unpleasant that was going to rock my world any day now, and then two months later heard about another, even more reliable study that proved the exact opposite, I would have one hell of a lot of nickels.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And yeah, computers are hard. Big news.
Now try posting on some Christian Coalition blog: "Satan not so bad after all, says new study"
Whatever.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. -- Samuel Butler
So Linux is the most secure and stable OS, huh? So it's completely secure, huh? So it's impossible to crack, a million times better than Windows, huh?
Hah.
#! /bin/sh
cat << EOF | mail -s "Microsoft source code" ifcc@fbi.gov
I stole and released the Microsoft source code.
And you can't catch me coz I'm 1337!!!
Suckerz!
.
EOF
Shoot! I meant to hit the AC button. There goes my karma...
God, I want to cry. I thought slashdot was supposed to be for people who were at least interested in science. Silly me.
Linux servers are cracked most often because they are the most common type, you slack jawed drooling morons.
Next let's add percentages together, won't that be fun?