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Linux in Canada
Flxstr writes "Lots of Linux articles in Canada's national newspaper today, starting with Calgary switching from SUN Unix to Red Hat Linux. Another article discusses whether Linux will become a target for viruses as its popularity grows. This article mentions how Linux costs less, so more firms are becoming interested. Finally, an article discusses how pushes by major vendors such as IBM, HP, and others is speeding acceptance of Linux over other alternatives. Altogether, some good articles for any CIO's desk."
If they were serious about saving money why did they invest in Intel? Why not AMD to really make a statement about proprietary lines go with the IBM Power PC.
As we all really know viruses are spread by stupidity of users, not the OS'es, so Linux popularity on the desktop will be it's deciding factor to virus targeting.
As it becomes easier to use and more useful to dumbasses who still open attachments they aren't expecting, it will likely be targeted more by virus writers.
Even if this is teh case I think the bigger problem will be when we have more Joe Blogs users who surf the internet as root. I see a lot of n00bs doing it and we always try and talk them round.
Even with the distro installers creating a normal acount its still worryinglt common. Run as root and you are more likely to be pwned in a nasty way.
We have higher turnouts for elections, less voter apathy and a greater social sense. Less crime, less intrusion of government into our private lives. If that makes us "socialist", I'm damn happy to be one.
Will someone please tell these morons that the underlying architecture of *nix based OS's with their permission structures, and the need for admin passwords to do any system level changes, make them MUCH harder to write a serious virus for. SCREAM it if they don't hear you. I'm really starting to get tired of this crap.
Windows is also more standardized than Linux, Mr. Friedrichs says. There are a number of distributions of Linux from different vendors, with differences significant enough that a virus or worm designed for one won't necessarily have the same effect on all the others. That fragmentation is a good thing when it comes to discouraging virus writers who want their work to have the maximum impact.
There's another advantage that they don't mention. Linux plays nicely with the BSDs, Solaris, OS X, and most other operating systems, so it really is easier to have a diverse environment - not just diverse distributions, but diverse operating systems and architectures.
Yes, Windows will work okay on a heterogenous network, but it doesn't really like it much. Compared to the shared UNIX foundations of Linux, OS X and BSD it is much easier to have all of them happily running side by side on the network sharing resources. Linux or Solaris workstations for the research division, Macs for the designers, Linux and/or BSD for the servers, developers get to choose their platform... and maybe even a nice pretty GNOME or KDE desktop for the paper pushers.
Jedidiah.
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About those viruses becoming more prevalent...
Can someone balance that FUD with equivalent numbers from MacOS X?? It's a lot more popular than Linux, and both haven't been plagued with viruses(yet) in widely publicised numbers.
The bit about multi-user was nice, but user-education about the benefits of proper privilege separation is very low, and needs to be addressed by those people who think changing OSes is a solution to the social problem of viruses. Of course, a lot of CIOs would rather use viruses to justify spending half a mil to change servers, than 10000$ on training... Even on equivalent returns...
That's also a social factor.
Microsoft is up here and is just as aggressive in corporate centres as in the US. However, Canada's national government has slightly different objectives than the US government or businesses, and that is a huge opportunity for Linux.
First off, for national defense or other confidential government affairs, linux would be the logical way to go -- its completely open source. The government could hire a Canadian company to customise and secure a linux kernel for specialised functions. If Canada buys Windows, however, there's no guarantees about security, and lets be honest...I find it perfectly reasonable to assume that there's a nudge-nudge/wink-wink backdoor in microsoft products for the NSA or CIA to leverage if necessary.
The other issue is languages. French isn't very popular in the US, but about 20% of our population speaks it and we're officially a bilingual country. We also have a whole territory (e.g. think 'province-lite') that is native speaking (Nunavut). When Windows 2000 came out here, the French version was several months behind...and it was more Parisienne French instead of Quebecois French, which was what was promised.
Finally, I think there's huge savings to get off the 'upgrade now' software assurance lifecycle. For government terminal functions (e.g. get a new driver's license) baseline it, secure it, and let it run for 10 years. No need to refresh you hardware and software every 3 years. Hell, refresh every 5 years and you've increased your equity by 40%.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I goto SMU and I know that we (as in cs faculty) have been slowly getting the univeristy aquianted with the whole open source ideas. Problem is there are still many people to educated, the in house tech support peeps still havn't fully grasped the whole idea I don't use Windblows and manage to be able to figure out how to map a network drive without logging 1st into the NT network and using all the XP "special" login scripts...
It takes user stupidity to infect a Linux box with a virus, namely because you _don't run as root_ unless it's necessary (su, please) and no code is therefore fully trusted. Therefore, it takes an idiot running as root, _multiple_ steps thanks to the encrypted archive files), and a Linux port of a virus to infect a Linux box.
With Windows, it's open, input password, extract, run. Wow. You're boned. Simple, ain't it?
Linux is secure simply because no one runs as root for daily work. Those who do are either idiots or have _really_ strong bowels.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
A few years ago (10?) the Alberta government started to move the primary focus of Alberta business away from the Oil patch. At that point in time, Alberta was sort of a one-trick pony - most of the head offices for the Oil industry were here (and situated in Calgary), with a large number of the smaller businesses supporting the larger (fewer) oil companies.
If the Oil economy went down, so did the rest of Alberta. Bad.
Over the past 10 years, business diversity has increased a tremendous amount; the oil industry is still a large part of our economy, but not so large that we'd be hammered to death if the price of oil dropped substantially. It would hurt, but much less than it would have 10 years ago.
Part of the reason for this success is the high level of technology in this province. Calgary especially is very high tech, and this latest story just enforces that point. Businesses tend to move fairly quickly here, and are able to take advantages of the benefits of newer technology.
Through the use of and research into technology, Calgary is both a very good place to work and live.
Nice try, but the National Post is owned by Izzie Asper's Winnipeg based "CanWest" outfit.
What are you talking about? Sure, CanWest-Global is Winnipeg-based, but the mention of "Canada's national newspaper" in the the article was clearly referred to the Globe and Mail, since it linked to the Globe in multiple places.
Virus writering/crackers are master at spending little energy. They will write them to go for the easiest target possible with the most damage being a side effect.
As soon as linux is one of the easiest targets, then we will see lots of them. Until that time, well...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Mr. Friedrichs says the majority of viruses and worms today are aimed at Windows, because of its large installed base. Threats that target Windows also tend to have more impact and get more publicity than those aimed at Linux, because there are so many Windows-equipped computers for them to affect, he says.
From what I have read and understand, the install base has nothing to do with it (or very little at least). The problem is that MS software is so easy to crack.
For example, MS Exchange has roughly a 85 million install base. That email system has been hit hard over the past several years. Lotus Notes has not been hit nearly as hard (if at all) during the same time frame. If install base had anything to do with it, then one would assume that Lotus Notes has a substantially lower install base than MS Exchange. The fact is that Lotus Notes has a comparable install base (of roughly 90 million).
It's the insecure software that is the problem, people!
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
It looks as though the cpsc department at the UofC is considering using fedora. The IT department is using Redhat AS 3, and they are also replacing their aix cluster with a linux one. Some engineering labs are also running some version of Redhat (I'm not allowed into those to see).
Besides in CPSC, I doubt SUN will be around here much longer....
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