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When Does Usability Become a Liability?
nasteric asks: "I caught myself in the middle of a very interesting discussion last Friday over Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee. The discussion had to do with usability and security. Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. They claimed making Linux a friend of Joe User will require it to 'open itself up' and become more susceptible to attack. Needless to say, this became an endless debate between our Microsoft Administrators and our Linux/Unix Administrators that will undoubtedly continue into the morning. Therefore I pose this question to the Slashdot community. Will making Linux more user friendly result in it becoming less secure? Hopefully your expertise will help shed some light on (and bring to and end) our discussion." Does decent usability necessarily imply the presence of vulnerabilities? Macs seem to have this area down pretty well, with little in the way of vulnerabilities. Can Linux software follow the same route?
Question: Is this an "Ask Slashdot" or an advertisement for Krispy Cream and Apple?
Also, since the editorial already starts us off with an "OS X vs Linux" flamewar, let me add to the discussion... Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!
Why do people think that the command line is *not* "user friendly"? Do we write books by pointing and clicking at icons, avatars, and pictures? Except under amazing cirumcstances (Steven Hawking, the blind, etc) would you hire an author that did? Then why a system administrator?
As soon as autoexec.bat runs.
You are not the customer.
Is hide the more advanced/"dangerous" features from users that normally don't need them. They're there if you, but if you don't know about them, you shouldn't accidentally trigger them. That's part of good useability, too.
OK, here we go:
Yes, because users are stupid. Most "viruses" at the moment need a stupid user. Also, more users=more damage=more chance of someone wanting to attack it.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Mac OS X is user-friendly and secure. Linux can
follow the same route.
One of the biggest design flaws in Windows from a security perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
One of the biggest design flaws in Linux from a usablity perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
I think that the claim has very little validity. I think the truth is that it "becomes more vulnerable" when the average user is less educated about security issues.
Making Linux more user friendly, in my mind, means improving upon the features that revolve around the GUI. The great thing about Linux is how much you can customize it; you can strip away the GUI and have a powerful production-level server environment. This is different from Microsoft products, as the ease of usability encompases the operating system.
Linux is much more "modular", in that you can build exactly what you want; an installation could take up anywhere from a few megs to a few gigs. The security and vulnerability lies in the end user.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
windows, linux it doesnt matter... Lusers will FIND a way to screw things up... If linux had the larger market share, worm writers would tailor code for it. I dont really think it would change the world as we know it.
Please, no comments about how Mac OS X was "attacked" by a trojan.
It doesn't "expose" some fatal flaw in the OS, nor is it some newly discovered exploit. All it is was an application that displayed a dialog box. Mac OS applications (with the exception of Cocoa applications) have always been able to have:
a.) any icon, and
b.) any name
The only remotely slightly interesting feature of this proof-of-concept was that it stored the executable code within an MP3 ID3 tag, and even contained valid MP3 data. But that's mostly irrelevant, since the executable code could be anywhere, and the code can't even be moved in raw binary form without destroying the resource fork. Though the major media outlets haven't picked up on the subtleties of this thanks to Intego's FUD-mongering and self-serving press release, this "trojan" is nothing more than a Carbon application. (Though, the discussion that comes of this will be fruitful: maybe Apple will revisit yet again the filesystem metadata vs. file extension dichotomy, and discuss novel ways of visually identifying executables, perhaps in the same fashion as aliases.)
So, to get on-topic, no, an OS doesn't necessarily have to become less secure to become user-friendly. Some (most?) of the security of an operating system, both from a user perspective and network perspective, comes from underlying philosophical design principles and fundamentals - not to mention the intensive peer examination that open source software encourages. Sure, some user-friendly "features", such as auto-opening attachments in the preview pane of Outlook, exist to make things "easier" for the user. But this is a wrongheaded approach: a sensible focus on security can solve the majority of problems without necessarily making it harder on the user. Ease of use and security aren't entirely, or even mostly, mutually exclusive.
The key is making security easy to use.
But the age-old technique of "tricking the user" will ALWAYS be possible via various means, on any OS on any platform.
I fail to see any such correlation between usability and security. As many others have said (and will say), OS X really does have it down in regards to their security model, which I hope is embraced on OSS *nix soon.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
By making it harder for Joe User to change settings to something unsafe/stupid.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
...then you should have asked for their explanation of why OS X is more secure than Windows.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
The answer is "No, because of peer review."
Lets move on..
no
It's the same thing that has happened to other fields that eventually grew to the point where people could do some of the work on their own. For comparison think of publications, once restricted to highly specialized professionals and now available to anybody with a printer and a copy of printshop. Those home-brew print jobs make the pros squeem in pain. Amateur work will always be amateur, and the results will reflect this.
Once Linux gets to the point that it can be administered by people who aren't dedicated specialists, it's inevitable they will try it out and that most of these people will be less careful administrators. After all they aren't dedicated *nix admins and will often wear many hats in their organization. This doesn't mean that Linux is insecure, it's just a growing pain that it has to go through.
Don't forget how many people fall into the "it's working, it's now forgotten" category. These are the people that only perform oil changes on their cars and wonder why it eventually breaks down on them - and there are a lot of them. They won't patch it, back it up or anything else until the day it inevitably comes crashing down around them.
Cheese it, it's the cops!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Seriously, just avoid the discussion. It always degrades into one of 2 arguments anyway: #1 you're stupid #2 you're gay There's no way to win the debate. Just ignore it.
...they actually mean something like to run everything as root so as to not bother the user with that all that pesky permissions-thingy nonsense, then yes Linux will of course become much more vulnerable.
Depends on how the make it more user friendly. Most of microsofts flaws come from coding errors and automaticaly opend ports and services that aren't used.
I think linux can be user friendly without all that but with anything the more layers you add to it the complexity and ability to keep it secure will become harder. Not impossible but harder. At least with linux you will know were the problems are instead of having it for 2 years and then finding a patch for it one day.
NO?
Take the basic Linux safety measure. Having to log in as root to do anything significant. Win has this as well (admin, power user, etc) , but most people run as admin, partly because of crappy, admin-rights demanding software, partly because Win doesn't really tell you not to, but also partly because its a PITA to remember, and log in with, that secure PW to do any installs or maintenance.
A "user friendly Linux" (Lindows, anyone?) will have to be very, very careful not to end up down this same path.
You need a COMMIT; in there to make sure your transaction runs, otherwise my base will still belong to me. For great zig! COMMIT;
I believe I saw you posting on Slashdot Friday night... need I say more?
OSX
On Windows they call it Administrator, on Linux they call it Root. It's the same thing, the user account that has no restrictions on it. Every user wants to run that way, because seeing a "permission denied" message on their own box just isn't going to make them consider the system user-friendly.
It's really more of a user eductation issue than a technical one. The best security practices are usually in counter to an element of ease of use.
- user-friendly
- vulnerable
and so they think anything that's user friendly must be vulnerable. A classic logic error, whose name I forget right now.User friendly does NOT imply vulnerable, nor vice versa. I've posted before about building secure systems and securing existing ones. The techniques are, for the most part, well known albeit tedious, though I do anyway. (I even posted a security advisory to BUGTRAQ today...)
As long as the people making Linux user friendly keep security in mind when designing and implementing the new features, there will be no problem.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Of course if you have elitist programmer types who use their case-modded Amiga's to talk to talk to each in Klingon don't expect your user experience to be one 'Joe User' can use or enjoy. If you are one of those people who are disdainful of people not as smart as you and want to keep Linux/OSS in the hands of your CRT tanned brethren then by all means continue to disparage and FUD usability all day long - just don't complain about Linux's adoption - EVER.
A few things for folks to remember:
-_-
Inevitably as you create environments that any idiot can use (see Windows) any and every idiot will use them - leading to more security problems.
As an example - up until the last couple of windows exploits, the user of the infected machine was required to open an encrypted .zip file with a provided password, see the executable inside of it, then execute the program to be infected.
How many experienced Unix admins would take a shell script out of an e-mail and execute the shell script that did an cd / rm -rf ? Not too many, windows users did it by the droves.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Have a look at Lindows. They make Linux easy enough for Windows users and supposedly, your grand mother to use. The first major step towards ease4 of use was the use of root as the primary logon. Security on these systems obviously just took a major step backwards.
Now let's face it, the ease of use your friends are talking about is things like not having to use a user ID and password when you turn on the PC and, most especially, not having to "su" to install spyware ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H pop-up blockers.
What had me thinking is why did the editor let us know that he was at Krispy Kreme's having donuts and coffee. That could have been left out.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
[As | If] Linux becomes more 'userfriendly,' security will suffer. This is not because it becomes inherently more vulnerable, but because it becomes accessible to ever less competent people.
A *NIX system does have inherent security advantages over Windows, but it still requires a very competent Admin to do a thorough job. Right now, I'd lay money (based on experience) that the average Linux Admin has a far better understanding than the average Windows admin simply because he needs to. This is going to change.
Consider that in my day, a programmer was still a computer scientist. Nowadays, I have to work with people who took a few months at a college course using a Visual design package and couldn't even program a Bubble Sort routine. It'll be similar with Linux security.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'm not sure how I understand how the product could be less secure. My concern, the same concern I have for Windows, is the implementation.
End users generally either accept defaults, or install everything they can - regardless of if it's anything they'd ever use. This also means opening all the ports for the applications they install (by default, in Windows). They're simply not experienced enough to appreciate what they do.
My limited experience in Linux (I consider myself a very average user at best) with Red Hat and Fedora distributions is that it opens itself up for whatever I install as well. I often find myself fortunate if I can get 80% of what I install working, so I suppose that's inherantly more secure.
However, I still use 14 character passwords in Windows and Linux. I still set appropriate permissions on files in both Windows and Linux. Vulnerabilities will always exist, regardless of platform. I fail to see how wider use would make the produce less secure, however.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
That's the sound of the point passing you by...
One of the biggest knocks on Windows is the whole "you have to be admin to do anything" security flaw. As linux gets more and more "user friendly", it'll be difficult not to follow microsoft's example, in certain respects.
Don't tell me you've never heard of linux users surfing the web as root...
oxymoron def:
Computer Usuability equals MS Windows..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Mandrake 10 is very usable, and is SECURE! To everyone who think usabillity and security can't exisit please try it! I am using it now! I wish people wouild stop going on about Linux usabillity it has been usable for YEARS! Stop using shit distros!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
A lot of security issues are related to either underlying architecture or social engineering. You can't always do anything about social engineering (leaving passwords in the open, providing information to a query on the phone), but the low-level architecture is a different creature entirely.
Why do Windows and other Microsoft-related products have so many security risks? It has nothing to do with the user-friendliness. It's at the core. Until and unless Microsoft is willing to write something from the bottom up which is not vulnerable to buffer overruns, you will always see security leaks (and hopefully, patches) in the news.
I haven't kept count, has anyone else? What percentage of the patches and security alerts are related to buffer overruns? (I'll wager dollars to those Krispy Kreme doughnuts it's a significant number)
And it's obvious Microsoft does not understand this issue is in the code's "DNA". Taking that month off to address "security issues" obviously did nothing. The security bulletins continue to flow as before. They just don't get it.
Usability doesn't mean "avoids security." It means the interface is easy to use. You can do this *with* security. For example, just asking the user to re-type their password before running admin tools, even if they have rights to run them. (No su'ing to root; no process should *ever* run as root with user input/control.) That means that a virus can't just start running admin commands without the user knowing.
SELinux (or, hopefully, a similar system with a sane configuration/management interface) can also assist with this by limiting what vulnerabilities can do.
And the interface design itself helps. Microsoft's attempts at usability equate to "do everything automatically." Compare this to GNOME where the design is based not on automation, but on streamlining. I fully believe GNOME is *more* usable than Windows in almost every way, yet it hasn't the security problems as apps don't try to auto-run executables from untrusted sources, embed scripting languages with system-modification abilities, etc.
In truth, the interface can be designed such that it makes using security easier, vs hiding security away.
The argument is usually phrased as "Convenience vs Security." They can be seen as being opposed. That's not quite the same as "Usability vs Vulnerability" but that's the direction your friends' arguments were pointing.
I'm not sure that it always holds true that you have a single gradient between Convenience and Security. You can have elements of both, and it's not just a fractional position between two extremes.
For example, the 'root' problem is that root or Administrator can do anything on the system, so cracker types will focus their attention on the major prize. The alternative would be to spread rights and responsibilities into fine-grained accounts like "backup" and "network" and "installer" and other capabilities. An attacker has to work harder, but the machine's owner does too.
However, that doesn't mean that you're going to have to allow web browsers and email clients to execute unknown privileged code. Many of Microsoft's engineers in the 90s had no concept of trust and privilege, and it showed. Those few who understood the implications couldn't drive the rest of the overwhelmingly "convenience-driven" corporate culture to really care about the down-sides to an all-root-all-the-time lack of security. Now that Microsoft knows the implications, their inertia has them at a strict disadvantage: they must change, and in so changing, they break their #1 asset: long-term backwards compatibility.
[
OSX is easy to use and purdy secure. Why can't Linux be too?
Someone once jokingly said that a broader userbase will result in less security. Thus the best way to secure software is to make sure nobody uses it.
/"
The main issue here is that the simpler an interface is, the less the user has to understand about the entire system. IF the system can sustain itself with minimal administration, it can survive.
The problem lies in making interfaces so easy that "mouse clicking solutions experts" can be lulled into thinking they've secured everything just because they've clicked on a few icons. If they understand the system fully, usability is a good thing. If you're a clueless user, a usable pointy-clicky interface can be a very dangerous thing that'll bork your system faster than you can su to root and type "rm -rf
"Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. " Ummm... what makes a Microsoft Admininstrator the authority on vulernability and usability?
and an Indian fellow named "Jack" was assigned my case.
I cannot wait to hear from "Jack" and hear how his beloved "Mets" are doing in this fine baseball season.
I await with interest to hear his small talk about traveling on the "NJ Turnpike" to work.
Tech Support. You gotta love it.
Were I paranoid I'd say the Microsoft boosters have finally given up trying to make the absurd claim that Microsoft's products aren't security nightmares, and they have begun to try to shift the blame on the users of Microsoft's products.
And of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean no one is out to get you. Heck, we need to be paranoid because Microsoft is scared shitless of Linux - because Linux represents the commoditization of software, and the commoditization of software will kill Microsoft's business. So Microsoft is desperate to slow or stop Linux in any way they can - see the money provided to SCO, see the astroturfing, see the paid shills like Enderle.
Tinfoil hat alert: why not a bunch of Microsoft "talking points" attacking Linux? (Kinda like the weekly Democratic talking points attacking Bush...)
whether you talk about Windows,Linux, OS X....
its not a security + useablilty, it's a balance between the two.
As you increase useability, security goes down by rule.
For example: In terms of network security.
A box not connected to the network is 100% secure form outside hackers, but 0% useable to outside users.
Example #2: A machine that installs with all services running and ready to go right out of the box and slapped on a network is 99% useable to remote users on the network but 1% secure.
No matter what OS you are using, it generally boils down to a balance between the two,because as you make things easier to use you inherently lose some of the control over securing the machine.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
Macs seem to have this area down pretty well, with little in the way of vulnerabilities. Can Linux software follow the same route?
Sure. Just keep your market share at 3% or less and few people will bother to write viruses and worms to take advantage of your vulnerabilities.
Take 10 jumps on Windows : 0.9^10 ~= 35% chance of getting 10 Windows machines in a row that might be vulnerable (assuming they haven't patched, and there has always been a patch for any of these widespread worms).
Mac: 0.03^10 ~= 6*10^-14%. Linux: 0.01^10 ~= 1*10^-18%.
I wonder why there are more Windows exploits. Hmm.
Macs are also closed source for most of their stuff - think that would work for Linux? Going closed source?
One nice trick Apple discovered is to have the users be non-root, yet still administrative. (Did you hear that, Lindows?) They did this by creating tools that run as root, but which require authentication to run. For example, a mortal user who is an administator can't trash the whole filesystem by dragging and dropping important items, because they are not root. But they can run Software Update, an application for downloading patches, by supplying a username and password.
On Linux you can add users to the group "wheel" and make them sudoers with much the same effect.
Apple also made many important directories like /etc invisible from within the GUI, which I think is a great idea as long as power users can turn it off.
Seems easy and secure to me...
There are Unix/Linux and Windows sysadmins in the organisation I work for.
There are around 5000 servers and 58,000 desktops to support across the globe.
Security is always at the expense of convenience.
Windows suffers from being immature compared to *nix, that's for sure.
Linux is already as easy to use as Windows, certainly for any sysadmin.
Why is it a MCSE doesn't understand how Ethernet and Token Ring can exist on the same network? That says everything if you ask me.
Also, don't forget the "many eyes make bugs shallow" phenomenon. It holds true for both scenarios. It's just that it happens to be a weakness for Windows where it's a strength for OSS.
Such a tired argument. It's more that marketshare that makes Windows such a target. This has been so well discussed that it hardly bears repeating, but: insanely liberal permissions on default install, heavy browser/os integration, and so on. I don't think Windows would have spread MyDoom and SoBig so rapidly if a security dialog had popped up asking the user to supply these worms with admin passwords as would have had to happen under OS X no matter what marketshare it had.
IHBT. IHL.
xox,
Dead Nancy
All the "secure code" in the world wont shield the system from a clueless user.
/ /dev/rand > /dev/dsp
As secure as you think OSX is, anyone who wanted to write an application to fuck stuff up, call it "Super Happy Funtime Sexy Game", and email it to morons, could do so just as easily as they could with a VBScript file.
I could write:
#!\bin\sh
rm -rf
cat
echo Linux is teh gay!
Email it to some stupid people, tell them they have to run it as root or else they wont see the video of Condoleeza Rice's tits.
Stupid people will run what came with the box they bought at Best Buy. When those boxes start shipping with linux, they'll be on linux. The REALLY stupid people shop at K-Mart, who I understand are in the business of ubercheap linux boxes these days.
Be afraid, be very afraid, of the rootkits that get put on this new army of lindows boxes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't think that linux afficionados would like to see what a distro that would be at the level of the infamous "Joe User" would look like. To do this, you would have to copy the Windows method of trying to prevent you from using anything besides Word and IE on your computer. This is not the best path for Linux. Linux should remain the better OS for the computer literate. There are certainly things that it could do to improve "usability" by the non-elite, but it should not dumb itself down. Furthermore, I don't agree that Windows is user-friendly. It seems like I have to do battle with it every time I want to do anything. It also hides a lot of things from you by default such as file extensions. Hiding file extensions certainly compromises security, especially for "Joe User".
_____
Thank you.
...people kill security.
As you've noted, Mac OSX has managed it (although in all honesty it probably isn't the focus of as many attacks as Windows). I think that the main problem is that if users are running their browsers, email clients etc under their own uid, and they contract a virus then it's going to cause damage to all their files. I don't know about anyone else here, but I value the files in my /home more than the rest of the OS, which can easily be reinstalled (yes, I do back up, BTW).
;-)
I think that maybe all vulnerable processes, like web browsers, irc clients etc should run under a separate uid from the user (maybe each user should have 2 uid's - one normal, and one restricted so that it can only access a subdirectory of the users home). So rather than Mozilla launching as user fredbloggs:fredbloggs, it launches as "fredbloggs_restricted:fredbloggs_restricted" by default. The user could then chown some directory to be writable to fredbloggs_restricted" for downloads, cache etc.
Maybe this is already implemented? The real problem though is that a user could still build and run something they downloaded, potentially wiping all their files, unless a mechanism automatically made anything they installed themselves, run as the restricted user and not their own uid:gid.
Does any of that make sense?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
...it's popularity. The more popular an OS gets, more script kiddies will target that OS as that is where they can do maximum damage.
The trick to usability is to have a power interface which allows you to change everything and anything in the system and have a newbie interface which allows you to customize to your hearts content but not change the underlying core components. Because what most "joe users" want is modifying the look and feel of their desktop and not going into changing network settings or CPU settings. If they want that and can do that I think they are already ready for the power interface.
GUIs let you explore until you find what you want by pointing and clicking on things. With command lines, you need to know the commands, and the options, before starting. That means that you need some sort of training before you start using the command line. So in your analogy, you'd have to "learn" the language of the OS before you can start 'writing' anything at all. Learning English actually took you a very, very long time, even if you don't remember it.
Once you have that training, the command line is a very useful tool. But if you can't get the training, and aren't self-sufficient or technically apt enough to go to the bookstore and buy a book on how to use the command line, you're screwed.
That's why people like having icons for things. The message icon is your mail program. Don't have to remember what it's name is, or where it's at. Just click.
I'm in the process of rewritting some small freely available application because the original caused my computer to segfault under two circumstances which I consider normal use. In rewritting it, i've eliminated those errors and maintained the same performance. As well, I decided to start using a memory profiler, Valgrind. The end result is a more user friendly tool because it doesn't crash in normal operation giving bad error messages that only a programmer would understand. It is also more secure... no more buffer overflows.
My point is, moving towards usability shouldn't mean that we should loosen our belts, allowing the user to run amock in the system, we should tighten them.
Usability, however, does have to do with coherent UI design: picking icons that communicate what the button does on a toolbar, grouping menus is a logical way, making sure that there are keystrokes available for commonly used features, etc.
It sounds like the Microsofties have confused usability with Feature Creep.
Now.. the more people running Linux may in fact lead to more vulnerabilities being found, since testing only proves the existence of bugs, not the absence. However, history shows that bugs are fixed much quicker in open source then in closed source, so that's a race Linux wins easily. But as far as usability, comparing the latest KDE and GNOME desktop to Windows XP just shows that as far as usability, Linux may have already surpassed Windows.
What you can't do is disregard security totally for years, get a large market using your product and then start thinking about security. Or at least it hasn't worked for Microsoft.
Usability and security are not at loggerheads.
I mean, take for example recompiling the whole of Windows again with a compiler that magically fixes buffer overflows.
That would considerably raise the security of the entire internet.
The consider the fact that the role that most people want to use their computers for like Word Processing Games, Web Browser, E-mail, Music etc.. don't require the administrator privileges to be useful then the real problem becomes apparent.
I have a windows box down stairs that is highly usable for my customers (my family) yet is highly internet hardened without any great loss in functionality..
Windows insecurity is a configuration problem as much as it's it's also a bad software development problem.
Simon.
Yes. when you add ease of use and transparency for the users' benefit you almost always have to give a little on the security. likewise, when you make something more secure, more often than not you have to make it a little less user friendly.
an easy example is Windows 2000/XP. XP comes by default with each user in the Administrators group. this is very bad security, as part of the point behind having normal user accounts is so that when a virus or something infects a user account it doesn't affect the whole system. the problem is, if the user isn't in the Administrators group they can't do things like install software or drivers. they'd then have to log out and log back in as Administrator and continue the install process (making sure to select Install For All Users And Not Just This one). then they'd log back out and back into their normal user account. if this was (for example) a laptop with one user then it would be too annoying a process for most users and they would either ditch their passwords or stick with the Administrator account or both. if they just put up with the annoyance their system would be much safer, but they want ease of use, so they say "oh who cares that i don't back up. how often do viruses delete files anyway?"
the more user friendly you make linux, the more _LIKELY_ it is that it'll become less secure, but if you do it right there's a much less likely chance of opening up new holes. it definetly takes work to keep it secure though.
I CAN'T BEL1VE THERE ARE S0 MANY !1NORANT SLASHDOTTERS POSTING ABOUT L1NDOWS RUNNING AS R00T! HAVE ANY 0F YOU EVEN TRIED IT?!? 1 HAVE AND 1 CAN TELL YOU THAT 1T MAKES Y0U CREATE A PASSW0RD 0N 1NSTALLAT1ON AND WHEN Y0U B00T 1T STR0NGLY WARNS THE USER T0 CREATE AN ACC0UNT! N0W ST0P WITH THE R00T BULLSHIT! THAT WAS 0NLY IN A BETA VERSION THAT WAS N0T RELEASED T0 THE PUBLIC!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
...if you put it on the administrative side, where you actually decide which packets get in etc., I think you are misunderstanding the term USER-friendliness, and instead get "admin laziness".
When you put it into the (features of) applications that users everyday use (office stuff), it can help a great deal without affecting security.
It is where the two things (admin/user) meet that the mushy stuff starts to hit the fan, so to speak. Implementing scripting capability with wide-ranging (or: poorly designed...) powers into a wordprocessor ? The admin can use it as a tool, the user can use it as a tool and, as such, the scriptkiddy can use it as a 'tool'. Just don't link two things that won't require this linking...
Making an application 'easily accessible' doesn't make it a bigger risk, as long as the application is clearly isolated from the system (including programming specifics like buffer overflows) and it doesn't result in adding 'hidden features' to said application.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
There is no reason that more user-friendliness would necessarily reduce the security of the average Linux installation, as long as the user was still more committed to security than to ease-of-use. But sad and frequent experience has shown us that ease-of-use is often more important than security.
;)
In cases where there is a trade-off, such as with executable email attachments, we saw what Microsoft chose to do. But before you condemn MS, first answer to yourself how often you check md5sum files of executable code that you download? And if you do, how did you ensure that the person who generated the md5sum is actually the creator of the file? Security often involves these kinds of trade-offs.
And that is why ease-of-use will end up limiting Linux's security in a default installation in the real world.
Of course, the real strength of Linux is that it is infinitely configurable, especially if you consider modification of the source to be "configuration". Therefore it can always be made secure, which isn't always true of MS boxes. Just try to disable that RPC service on your XP box, I dare you! (And then do a google search for how to reg-hack it back to enabled, since you won't be able to open the Services window anymore.
Side rant: IMHO we need to get the crypto crowd to start thinking hard about usability, because they will probably be better at creating usable security products than the average joe programmer would be at making their usable software secure. And right now, there is definitely a barrier between the two fields.
Your MS friends are right in one way that comes to mind. The weakest link in security is almost always the user. Social engineering is often the easiest "hack" in any system. As a reference, consider the virus plagues that spread widely despite requiring users to do stupid things.
Making the system more "user friendly" means that users with less education regarding the issues inherent to computer systems will use it. Less educated users are more likely to fall victim to social engineering attacks. Thus, a system which is more user friendly will be more open to attack.
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I mean how many DOS virus are going around still? I know there were 50,000 back in the day, but now, I'm curious how many are "in the wild".
When's the last time a DOS 5 computer running a text based server was hacked? What if it only runs plain-text emails, whens the last time there was a DOS exploit/virus released?
Hmmm, does this mean obscurity = security? Scary, it just might!
I've told people for a while now, you want secure? TEXT ONLY. GUI's are the downfall of computers I tells u!
Mod +5 Drunk
I bet most people would agree that as a distro caters more toward usability as a desktop OS it can introduce security problems that are not acceptable in a server OS. For example, Lindows uses root accounts for general use. For a desktop system this enhances the usability and (maybe) isn't a major security risk. At least not as bad as a server OS doing the same thing. Of course, you would assume that a true desktop OS would not have a bunch of extraneous crap running, like telnetd, for no reason.
I think once we see more of a separation between server distros and desktop distros, the issue of usability/security will be less severe. I know that there are specialized server distros but the fact that we are talking about "Linux" exemplifies that there is not really a very distinct separation.
It isn't that making Linux more user friendly will make it less secure. It is that making the tools require less understanding will lead the friendly users to a false sense of security.
Consider netfilter/iptables... Understanding how to really secure your system from this particular perspective requires a bit of study. Sure, you can paint relatively broad strokes and secure your system with a few clicks for a large majority of cases. But not knowing how the configuration files ended up being written means not knowing to what you are actually vunerable as a result of making a few simplistic choices.
Unfortunately, the Peter Principle often applies to home computer ownership, too.
If corporations start writing applications/distributions aimed at "DeskTop" users then the server features included will be less secure - If I am releasing a new Desktop App - I will be more worried about UI - features ect... If I am writing a server App - I will be more worried about Access Control, preformance... It will ultimately be where the $ is...
Does any of that make sense? ;-)
Nope. Any system that doesn't allow the user to do whatever they want to do is going to is not user friendly. We've got two somewhat paradoxical concepts here.
Users will always want to be runing at root at all times. Some won't grasp the security implications until it's too late.
Because then they would have to actually edit the story, instead of putting the smack down on trolls.
I like the little cups of strong coffee. Could never understand the appeal of Krispy Kreme doughnuts though. I am lucky enough to have a local place which knows that a doughnut is supposed to be light and fluffy. The more sugar the better.
I suppose the security issue comes from insufficient caffiene and sugar. All these people on low carb diets have no idea what they are doing to thier minds.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Microsoft sacrifices security because, in their model, it is often the easiest way (tm) to make something more user friendly. So from a Microsoft point of view, it seems obvious that security and user friendliness are mortal enemies. That doesn't mean the two naturally correlate.
On the other hand, anyone can make a linux box insecure. The question then becomes as simple as whether you trust users to administer their own boxes. This is where you need user friendliness. This is where the OS has a choice to remain secure by staying obfuscated (and thus scaring users away at the expense of functionality) or become more friendly (at the risk of letting users hurt themselves).
Windows, by default, can be (is?) insecure. But that's not where the "(Microsft vs. Linux) vs. (User Friendly vs. Insecure)" debate should begin.
Hey linux--how about you worry about that particular hurdle when it's within a light year away or so?
The answer clearly is "maybe." It all depends on implimentation. Simplicity in itself is not responsible for vulnerabilities. Simplicity is the goal for the designer. Usability is the goal (and key) for the user. The problem is when you ignore good security methodology in the name of K.I.S.S and for the uneducated user.
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom, they want to click on an icon or (if they're at the commandline) type in just the path to the drive. Autofs (and the like) go pretty far for this. But that's just a beginning.
I think it would be better to educate the users than to dummy-down the OS. Education needent be difficult. Documentation is key to understanding. If the user can't/won't read the docs....then it's all their problem, but if the docs are there, and they're clear and concise, and he reads them and can use them. Then you have a good system.
End users like "Joe Sixpack" don't want to have to type things like mount
Take Microsoft's lead. They spent an enormous amount of time, money, and effort making the systems useable and simple. Apple did the same (albeit on a slightly different track). Linux can too. Just because someone makes Linux (as a whole) easier for Joe to use doesn't mean that security will go out the window. It just means that there's more that needs to be thought about before implimentation.
And that's why there's the "maybe."
Why don't you guys just settle this like adults?
Flintlocks at 10 paces, then fire.
Your example is faulty out the yin-yang because you could have a usable interface to securely set-up a system with those very things you mention as being insecure.
What it generally boils down to is having the developer form the experience around the behaviors of the user rather than make the user conform to how the developers thinks they should react to the software. This typically pisses-off developers and makes them resent the very people they are writing the software for.
-_-
To make things user friendly, you have to make them more robust. Linux is already robust, so it's not an issue. The only disadvantage is that you'd have to secure the system against its users and the outside world. Look at Mac OS X: Most of the users don't even know about the Terminal, or that they're using a Corvette to drive the kids to school, so to speak. (FreeBSD in home computing, that is.) I think it would be a good model for Linux. People like shiny things, and I don't think there are enough of those in Linux.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
i used to be tech coordinator at my school. oh the headaches. anyways, i'd get all kinds of lame ass questions about how to do simple things. people learned how to use windows. just like riding a bike, it takes time. windows UI's break lots of guidelines. ever look at all the dialog boxes, like the font box, or the print dialog. they are 1st class abortions. and how 'bout office. what, a toolbar button that is a pop up menu, which can then double (or triple?) as a pull off floating toolbar? (it's a desert topping, it's a floor polish!) windows has had the luxury of being how things are done, and people learn to use it. so, anything that doesn't do it that way is "wrong" and "difficult". it's no different that driving on the right side of the road, with the pedals on the left side of the car. (here in the US) linux desktop by default has to emulate/mirror windows (mis)feature for feature. now, there are lots of bonuses like in konq, but 100 cool things doesn't make up for the 1 thing it doesn't do like windows. the best hope for linux desktop is new users without the pre-conditioned actions. i had several linux desktops in my old 7th grade class. you'd be amazed that kids with little computer training can pick up kde or gnome. it's just that they're not stuck, as it were, doing things the redmond way.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If usability means all powerful scripting then Linux will become as troublesome as Windows. If, on the other hand, it remains impossible to run full executables from HTML (and then not be able to exclude HTML email even as an option) then the major attack vector for Windows will never exist.
If HTML email can still be turned off in Linux (like all the email programs in Linux do) then not only can't spammers run trojans but they don't know if I look at their creative efforts.
Port exploits will remain a problem in both Windows and Linux. Patches are issued for both on a somewhat regular basis.
Presumably Gator and other spyware would need to be rewritten for Linux and packaged as RPM's to be installed by Joe User based on his version of Linux. Somehow I suspect that it would be less frequent when installation is not a thoughtless act of clicking a box.
Only a "Built for Windows TV" would ever need such a capability !
The Linux security model splits user (fancy stuff) and root (low level stuff) very well. Retail Windows has only recently had this separation; ever tried to log into Administrator in Windows XP Home ?????
As GNU/Linux (a distribution) becomes more user friendly (presuming is isn't already) then nothing the GNOME or KDE can do would break the intrinsic security of the Linux kernel. Nothing.
So as long as a user plays in user space , Linux is happy to keep the hardware rocking. Log in to root and all bets are off but even so, when Linux has the NSA stuff then root won't always mean root.
Nah - this is stupid. a GNU/Linux distro like Mandrake is user friendly and as long as you are not using root - it can be secure and quite usable. Sounds like FUD to me.
I see it this way. An operating system should be as secure as posible and as usable as possible...it is possible with minimal sacrifice...i mean look at the numeros linux distros like Suse and mandrake and the like...im not even going into lindows and xandros...i never used OSX so i cant make a comment but in most of my expereances (I'm a part time computer tech) Linux for the "AOLish" people is no difrent than windows and look how much more secure it is...i disagree with popularity making things vulneruble..i think its design...windows is not desighned with security in mind in the first place and nether are the apps that run on it... on the other hand if u put linux or any nix for that matter on someones box with all the services off it will work...i did it lots of times...when i have to format somones infested box i throw suse or mandrake on it and i have zero complaints because people have less problems in general...its posible to do it with windows but some apps will refuse to work without admin privledges...basicly the way i see it is windows is a broken legacy system that should be replaced from the groud up...im not bashing microsoft but windows is just not a good product and security is not very lickeley on it...for averge users it dosent matter what os it is...most people i do work for are also clueless in windows and thats why they hire somone to help them set things up...even if another non ms Unix derived os came to the top of the market I think it will be more secure because it is not windows...
The argument that Would. Not. Die. Seriously, you can see this argument popping up in discussion forums everywhere with great regularity. Then you can read it in major computer industry publications, too. I'd like to believe that ./ readers know better. For those that don't, here's an interesting article.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
While we're on the subject of usability vs. security, does anyone know of a link to those gag pictures from a few years back of the user-secure keyboard and mouse that don't have any buttons? I want to save them this time. I'd post 'em if I had 'em - they're almost on-topic and a certain +5 funny.
Thanks.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Windows greatest benefit: "1 click = complete install"
.ini files as well as config.sys & autoexec.bat to squeaze every inch of preformance out of a box that we needed. The dumb office-sheep had there 5-6 iconc that launched the few programs that they needed on a day-to-day basis. They didn't need or care about all the settings because it did what they needed to.
Windows greatest flaw: "1 click = complete install"
There is no reason to assume that making GNU/Linux _more_ user-friendly will mean that it will be more insecure.
Most linux distros (with default installs) look like an evil half breed of XP & Mac OS, large `cutesy` icons do not make an OS easier to use. (Just ask anybody that is skilled with MacOS).
What is wrong with the old DOS days & Win3.1 from a useabily standpoint? Not much. (8bit & 16bit code notwithstanding) When configured correctly it worked.
Here is a novel concept: Aim that that level OS knowledge in your users. The "power-users" could easily find & tweak the
I have been trying to use Linux since the RedHat5.2 days. I know my way around a dos prompt but the simple things like being able to tell the difference between a txt file and an executable file were beyond me at that time. (I now know that file extensions are not necessary, but imagine how much easier it would have made life.)
If Linux were easier to add apps to (1 click = install) BUT more strict in what it allowed to go through the NIC, that might make for a decent compromise.
* I know everyone here used to curse at win3.1 but try to seperate the shitty 8-16 bit code issues that plagued it.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
yields a bigger bite out of Microsoft's marketshare
yields more desperation at Microsoft's headquarters
yields more Linux-virus-writers hired by Microsoft.
In Mandrake 10, configuration is split in to two control centers. "Configure your desktop", to configure desktop stuff, and "Configure your computer" to do the dangerous stuff, which requires root password. Mandrake is one of the most usable linux distributions out there, with millions of satsisfied users, plus its secure! So the answer is : Usabillity dosen't equal insecurity. Just run Manmdrake update once in a while to keep up with the security patches. For those who want to see the usabillity magic of mandrake 10, download the iso files here. This ask slashdot question is nonsense, if slashdot employed competent editors this question would of never been posted!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
Clearly the idea that a OS that is usability is easier to attack seems intuitively right. However like many inuitive ideas like this it's wrong. The current MacOS is much much more usable (as defined by Jakob Nielson) than either Linux or the current Windows XP. However it is considerably more secure than either product. It all comes down to proper design in a network setting. The Mac OS was designed as a secure network OS first and then layered with Apple's top notch GUI. This shows the base idea (systems with high usability have poor security) to be false. The problem is that Windows NT, 2000 and XP were not originally designed as networked OSes. SO applications are often granted root priviledges (and need them to run) while applications that run on a properly design OS, can run in user space.
Thalasar
Wpart of DCOM is user-friendly, exactly?
bigger payoffs.
Right now, the userbase is small, the difficulty high. More usability will mean more consistency, and more stupid users, which will make the platform a much bigger target than it is now.
Jerky's law
As the number of users grows, so do the number of successful attacks.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
[root@localhost]$ chmod -R 777 /*
My take on the whole thing - the one thing that definitely does happen to technologies and systems in general ( including OSs) is that the easier it becomes to use it - the easier it becomes to Ab(use) it - for me security considerations are merely unchecked abuses of the system - To make things clearer - take the analogy of Email - the original intent was for free and easy communication - which also mean for spammers - a free and easy guerilla marketing tool - so - in essence - I would say that Useability does imply - more chances of Ab-using it !
..And the people bowed and prayed, To the neon gods they made.
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
When Linux switched from ipchains to iptables, was there an inherant trade of security for usability? I hope not. You might point out that very few people use iptables or ipchains directly, which leads me to my real point.
GNU/linux is a collection of disparate software. There isn't a large entitity directing the manufacture and integration of the various tools hewn together to make what most people think of as "Linux." Usability means something above and beyond vim and bash. iptables is nice, but shorewall is usable. Sure, you can think of some trades a distribution might make ie users as root. But building an integrated system of management isn't nessecarily a bad thing, and done in a well thought out and managable way can actually help a hardened system. apt-get makes updating for security releases nearly painless, but it would be hard to argue that the added usability detracts from security. Sure, the servers could be comprimised, but so can source code. In the meantime, there's several ideas roaming about in certificying package authenticity.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Linux is simply taking the reverse path, focusing on security and stability first, and then trying to build improved usability on top of that. MacOS1-9 had the same problems really. A great and very user-friendly interface that was build upon an insecure and somewhat unstable base. Time has shown that the only way to fix this is to pretty much start over from scratch..
then Windows would be user-friendly, no?
Seriously, though: it depends on what you mean by user-friendly. If you mean works just like Windows (i.e. running as superuser by default, LookOut!-style e-mail running attachments by default, etc.), then yes, security flaws are inherent. These generally stem, however, from the inherent regular/super-user problem that single-user OSes like Windows exemplify.
On the other hand, if user-friendly means simple to use, then no, security flaws will not be the natural result. Just look at the current state of the KDE project for proof.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Most average computer users use Windows, so they're accustomed to using windows. If they were all used to doing things differently then the term "usability" would apply to the system that they were all used to using.
For (a rather simplistic) example: If the toolbars in windows software were all at the bottom of a window instead of the top, people would automatically look down there for them, instead of the top. This is what they would be used to. So, in this senario, putting them at the top would be considered less user-friendly since it requires the user turn off autopilot and think about it for a second.
I'd agree that linux needs to be more intuative if it's ever going to be mainstream but why assume the need to be exactly like windows in order to do this. Just teaching the average user that different isn't nessessarly more difficult is part of making the system more "Usable"....isn't it?
Silly rabbit
Linux is secure because it properly serperates ordinary user priveliges from superuser priveliges. It is secure also because of the peer review inherent in its development process. None of these things are going to change.
It's conceivable that, in the future, idiotic distros will set users up with root accounts. However, this seems doubtful as people who make distros aren't idiots and the security of regular user accounts is too valuable to throw away. More likely, the distros will insist that the user provide a root password during the install process and then demand it whenever the user tries to install software or make system changes. The ordinary user will probably not understand why this must be on the most basic level, but he will put up with it as an unavoidable nuisance. Thus, Linux will be as secure from a technological standpoint as it is now (probably even more so, see SELinux for example). If end-users choose to make their root passwords "password," or enter it into any pop-up dialog that asks, this is not Linux's fault.
This means that yes, a trojan horse could run, and yes, it could keep running until the user logs out, and maybe even add a login item on a per-user basis, but it can't install anything into the system that runs at startup unless the user explicitly enters a password to say that "yes, I really expected this to be installing something". This simple authentication requirement would have prevented 99% of what has made Windows viruses so virulent.
In fact, the best form of user-friendly security basically amounts to having a bunch of policies for things that shouldn't generally happen, then shouting at the user and asking if you really want to do that. This concept has been popping up repeatedly on the Mac platform ever since the classic "GateKeeper" virus checker extension. I remember saying that I wanted to see an OS do exactly this sort of sanity checking (don't let an application modify the OS without user permission) back when I was still in elementary school (mid-eighties).
So here's what I don't get.... If this was obvious to me at about age 10, what does that say about companies that still haven't figured out how to implement such a basic security measure? And why would anyone in his/her right mind use an OS like Windows whose security policies haven't caught up to what seemed obvious to a 10-year-old kid almost 20 years ago?
For shame.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If the user doesn't care about security then it is hard to add more security without making the system more difficult to use.
On the other hand a system infected with viruses and trojans can be un-usable.
In all fairness to MS, the Windows history is from a novice single user or small work group. Windows was kinda of thrust onto the Internet, by, well, the growth of the Internet. It is more usable and less secure because of that.
Linux has the whole multi-user UNIX, USENET, geek, Internet history behind it. It is more secure and less usable because of that.
I see Windows and Linux evolving toward each other in security, in usability and in many other ways.
I agree. People argue and bicker way too much about their desktops. It's really not all that productive.
Life is offtopic.
There's an interesting blog entry about this over at Wil Wheatons blog
Soon you find yourself su`ing whenever something complains it wants to run as root.
Finally, you get pissed off and add yourself to
Instant linux virus: "nudie-pictures.jpg" (chmodded +x, of course).
Duh.
Natural language is also, compared to computer languages, extremely stable.
So when we move to more fuzzy based computing systems and we get people programming simple-to-moderate automation tasks based on speech recognition algorithms, image representation computer languages, and feedback loop based "AI" that interprets our spoken and visually represented commands, does that mean our computer systems become less "stable" even though they are ultimately based on the mathematical flip-flopping of 1's and 0's?
OS X and the other BSDs topped the most secure OS list. It was also rated by OS News I believe as one of the best operating systems the rated had ever seen. Great OS that is secure.
Evolution or ID?
If it's ease of learning, then yeah, a picture is probably worth a thousand words. If it's actual ease of use (which is NOT to be confused with the latter- even though everyone and his dog keeps doing it...), then a CLI may well be the thing.
There's a lot of things that are purely cumbersome because of the GUI under XP or MacOS.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
One cannot compare a service/daemon to an operating system. The average user will never configure Apache or Microsoft's IIS.
I'm not defending Microsoft at all. Windows has many problems that need to be fixed. The best example is root access for users. The problem stems from Window's "root" (I made a funny) which is DOS, a single user OS. Linux on the other hand from the beginning was a multiuser OS. The problem I now see is that people are trying to make Linux too easy (ie. Lindows). This sounds good on the surface but I fear Linux is moving to the single user model on the desktop.
The best thing Microsoft can do now is to start with a new codebase.
I think the Windows admins mistake usability with features or something else like insecure macros. I think the design approach of linux is much more protected and secure than what we saw in Windows to date. This has nothing to do with usability at all. It just had to do with the convenience of MS to not have to deal with security issues.
Yes, user friendly is code for "accessable to people who are not computer literate" somone who is not computer literate will use a more friendly to use computer operating system. Which, while it may be secure, will have flaws, since no system can be 100% flaw free and still grow. (if you fix the features of a piece of software, you can approach perfection, but even the software to run the space shuttle had 4 bugs in it) As more and more people use the software, more and more non literate eyes are looking at it, and not adding to the software (if it is open source) but they are finding flaws in the software, they just arent doing anything about it except maybe complaining to each other. As the number of newbies reach critical mass, some malicious user will exploit one of the flaws in the software, making use of the gullibility of those who use said software, reducing security.
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WHY are there so many people claiming Linux is hard! REPEAT AFTER ME!
MODERN LINUX IS EASY TO USE!
MODERN LINUX IS EASY TO USE!
MODERN LINUX IS EASY TO USE!
MODERN LINUX IS EASY TO USE!
If ANY of you disagree, reply to this post with ALL of the following
Your distro and version number (if its less than 9.0 upgrade and try again).
Your full hardware specification
What you found hard.
For reference : I am using Mandrake 10.0.
Software installation is done all from the GUI, with automatically solved depenencies. My Printer, Digital camera, TV card, Sound card, Scanner mouse, keyboard monitor all just automagically work!
I have KDE 3.2, which has had over a YEAR of usabillity improvements, if you are not using KDE 3.2 then upgrade and try again! OpenOffice.org 1.1 has ALL the speed problem solved, so upgrade if you are using the slow version! I can run all my legacy Windows software securly in a sandboxx using crossover.
And I have used both OSX and Linux and Mandrake linux 10 stomps all over OSX for usabillity! Its so easy to use that I removed OSX and put Linux on my mac! Its that easy! My brother who is illiterate can use linux because of the nice shiny icons that KDE provides
So if you have any of the following problems
*Depandancies
*Bad fonts
*Slow office suite
*Ugly GUI
Than upgrade your distro! Either to Mandrake 10.0, Ark Linux 11, SuSE 9.0 or Fedora 2 when it comes out!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
It's all about the Human Interface Guidelines people.
Every app has most of the same keyboard shortcuts and the same menu items in the same places. That means that on a Mac I have to learn the interface once.
I just point and click at the main menu and select "Preferences" to get to my preferences. I press Command-C to copy and Command-V to paste. It doesn't matter if I'm in Safari, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, or Word. My most commonly used shortcuts are the same in every app.
Apple has been very good at this sort of thing. Linux hasn't, I'm sorry to say. Think about it. Where do you go in Mozilla to change the preferences? Now, where to you go in Evolution? See what I mean? It doesn't matter that you knew how to do both. What does matter is that you had to think about it. That's the difference between a "usable" and "intuitive".
If Windows is easier to use than any particular Linux distro (and I believe it is), it is only because they have a more consistent interface across applications.
So what do you (i.e. the Linux developers of the world) do about it? Standardize! Come up with an open HIG document, and then STICK TO IT!
It's not rocket science, people.
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
Sorry for the off-topic slashdot-posting-meta-post, but...
Is there a cap on the amount of karma you can earn in a reply to your own post? I'm not trolling, and I don't want to sound accusatory, but if I wanted to earn some points toward meta-modding and the posting bonus point, Why wouldn't I introduce some trivial error into a post and then issue a follow-up correction that also gets modded up?
Remember that there are two schools of user friendly interface design. Microsoft goes for the 'our users are stupid and can't learn, so let's just do it for them and name the options so people will be afraid to change things'. Apple uses 'our users are stupid, but maybe they can learn, so lets make all the options make sense and do what they say they do.'
In my experience, Apple's way of doing things makes the user feel empowered, and is much less scary and overwhelming. People are more likely to know how to change their screensaver in OS X, and are less afraid to do it, because it's more accessible to them. OS X doesn't present options that imply that if you do it wrong, your computer won't work again. Notice that OS X dialogs generally don't even have Cancel or OK buttons. You change something, and it changes. You don't like it, change it back (Network options do have an apply and cancel for obvious reasons). Personally, I like Apple's way better.
Sir Humphrey: "All cats have four legs. My dog has four legs. Therefore my dog is a cat."
This topic reminds me of a cartoon I saw once. In it there were two people at a chalk board. The chalk board was filled with a complicated flow chart; each box containing formulas and numbers and equations. Near the end, right before the "Answer" box was one that stated "Here a miracle happens". The caption was "I think we need to work on this part a little".
Anyway, my point is that the assumption that ease of use = lack of security is a non sequiter. There was nothing stated in the topic to support that conclusion. Additionally, I don't know of any evidence to support the assumption that security flaws are inherit to easy user interfaces.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I'd actually argue that having all services turned off by default doesn't impact the "average dumb user's" useability experience at all, because the average dumb user utilizes their system pretty much exclusively as a client.
This is part of why home-NAT devices were able to spread so quickly among regular home users... because they don't care if their system can be accessed via ssh, http, or whatever... as long as they can access other systems in the expected fashion.
Still, a nice observation (once corrected).
I remember using Redhat 9 and running into a problem editing the main menu in Gnome; 1 hour later I found that menu editing was turned off by default and needed to be turned on. Now, all issues about whether editing the menu should be off by default or not aside, wouldn't it have been a good idea to at least mention this in some readily available documentation instead of having to dig through tons of posts about this problem before finding a solution?
This, to me, represents a lot of the Linux experience as a whole to users that want to utilize the OS for something other than scripting or coding or whatever. Regardless of how pretty the desktops become or how many more codecs mplayer gets, various defaults (that matter in terms of usability) only accessible through various text files that are next to impossible to find any documentation on will keep Linux in this unfriendly place.
Also, before you make the plugs for Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Suse, etc, I have tried all of these distros and found them to be roughly the same or worse in terms of overall usability as Redhat so don't make the claim to me that one is better overall than the other. You can, however, make that claim to other readers.
So I basically think that this whole idea of usability being inversely related to security doesn't yet apply to Linux. If you're talking about nice desktop environments or other nifty guis then blather on.
Just my own critical opinion though I know that most of you other open-minded people will correct my views... Let the name calling/personal attacks begin.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
I'm not sure why people have such a predisposition toward one or the other? Why can't we have both usability and security? Shouldn't people be able to use computers they way the drive a car? Just because there are complexities and advances in different parts of a car that makes a car, a driver shouldn't need to know anything more than just drive safely and rely at the same time that the car won't break down as he's driving it. :)
A GUI you have to learn to click, double click, right click, directory structure, etc. You still have to learn. You are just learning something different. instead of cd [enter] you are double clicking on something. wether you type it or click it you are still learning something.
Evolution or ID?
I'm not a desktop linux user, although I've got a Knoppix disk around for when I had a corporate machine and wanted to be able to play games when stuck in a hotel room and not violate the "don't install games" policy (among many other things).
Windows 'grew up' (OK, it's only in its adolescence, from how often its face breaks out) on a one-user framework. Linux' unix background has always had the root+users built into it. But are the 'desktop' users of Linux normally the root user?
Even with NT/2000/XP, I can't live without being "Administrator" because of the frequency of installing software, if only for a test drive. Logging off and on is a pain in the butt.
On the other hand, the inability to install software (as simple as Perl modules) in 'my' space on a shared host is one of my biggest incentives to leave my shared host for a dedicated server (not worth the 6X cost increase just for that).
In my mind, what Windows needs is a simple, "This requires Administrator Mode to continue. Please enter the Administrator password, or click cancel to prevent this from continuing." dialog.
That would let me run in a safer sandbox, with minimal hassle, and a pretty darn stern warning that isn't any less secure than leaving idjits in Admin level like they are now.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Why is he talking about popularity? The OP is talking about how usability affects security, not how popularity affects security.
Maybe he's saying popularity and usability are the same thing? Well then, we know where LODT's problem really is. : )
Quick answer: Yes. Making Linux more "user friendly" will potentially make it more insecure.
The main thing about Linux (as with all true multi-user OSes) is that a regular user can't do much of anything. User's can't install a new program or a simple browser plugin. Hell, some Linux distros don't even let regular users mount and access USB drives, floppies or CD-ROMs.
Doing away with the need to login as root (or "su") to do anything more than running installed programs. will definitely help make Linux more user friendly, but that is precisely what keeps Linux secure. I am currently migrating from Windows to Linux and I often forget to "su" before installing a program. It gets annoying, and may be one thing that keeps Linux from being an everyday desktop OS for the common person.
Now, I -- and several other geeks -- are taking (or have took) the time to learn Linux and have the patience to deal with its quirks. The problem is, Joe Average Computer User doesn't have the patience. He's the guy that only has the Administrator account on his Windows XP box because he can't be bothered to log out and install software as admin. Joe Average needs to get something done, and it needs to be done now. Joe Average is the user that defies all of the warnings about running as Admin. I honestly feel that typing "su password" then changing to the proper directory is something that the average user just doesn't have patience for.
If no one ran Windows as admin, it would still be a flawed OS, but its vulnerability would be significantly decreased. Linux, so far, has a low vulnerability, and I believe that is because no one (hopefully) runs Linux as root all the time.
If you give Joe Average a Linux box and show him how to use it, he'll probably never use the "adduser" command. He'll treat it just like his Windows box and will always be logged on as root.
Now that I think about it, I retract my original answer. Making Linux more user friendly will not necessarily make it more insecure. Giving a Linux box to Joe Average Computer User will make Linux more insecure because the average computer user can't be bothered to learn how to keep his box secure.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
IMO: More usability means more code, more code means the probablity for vulnerablity increases. This means as more code is introduced the probability for vulnerabilities is also increased. So, I would say the probability for Linux to become more vullnerable will increase as usability increases.
I use Mandrake 10.0, and I never had something to do something like that to access my CDROM! I just insert the cd, the icon appears on the desktop, i click it and there I am! Looks like your using a pretty messed up distro!
My impression is that OSX has lots of backdoors because they had to make a tradeoff between shipping an OS on time and getting it perfect. I'll bet it will get more secure over time - Linux/UNIX is secure by design (unlike Windows) and it's just a thin layer of setuid utilities that cause the trouble.
/mnt/cdrom. That's not a good example. What about adding new users? Can you make a bulletproof setuid useradd ? A bit more of a challenge.
On my Linux box I can put a CD in and have it automatically mounted as
Anyway, users having root access isn't a big deal. Say a user is maximally unsafe and always logs in as root. Then a virus can trash his whole OS. He will have to restore the OS from the install CD and then his files from his most recent backup.
On the other hand, say a user is very secure and there is no way for a virus to get root. So it just does a rm -rf ~. He doesn't have to install from CD but he does have to restore his files. Probably that won't be a big consolation when his last backup was 6 months ago.
I guess the person who posted this has a very simplistic approach to the question he poses. With the same logic we can ask does making cars go faster make them more prone to accidents? Well, an uneducated answer would be a strong yes? But when you consider the fact that there are tons of other factors that play into an accident, it becomes obvious that relating one cause (ease o use) to a result (level of vulnerability) is not so easy.
If you were to make Linux AS userfriendly as Windows, I am sure it will be as vulnerable. But the question should be, is how much user friendlyness is neccessary? Can Linux sacrifice some ease of use for avergae joe and still maintain enough security for avergae joe? That is what needs to be answered.
Stupidest. Question. Ever.
Look, can you honestly suggest that making things UNfriendly will somehow secure Linux? By making settings confusing and leaving things undocumented, you only serve to work against the user. Do you want defeated users deploying Linux systems? In fact, it looks like that is happening already -- the BSDs, MacOS, even Windows has fewer security problems than Linux (of course, I dispute the Windows part of it, since they didn't bother to count viruses). MacOS is the most user-friendly system in the world, and yet it has fewer issues than Linux. You might wonder about the BSDs, but at least in my experience, I don't see them getting deployed everywhere. So whatever 1337 system is in place now for Linux isn't working.
The problem is that Linux is now accessible to a huge chunk of the population, but only half that chunk of the population can slog though the proper administration of a Linux box. This has to balance out -- if we want to push Linux out to everyone, then everyone ought to be able to figure out how to secure it. If we want to limit Linux's penetration to "power users and above" then we have to be sure Linux can be secured by them. Whatever line we draw in the sand, we need to cater to those people. If that means better or more robust help systems, great. If that means more people need to volunteer to document the apps, great. If that means that we should program defensively, defaulting to the more conservative options and putting the dangerous settings under a tab labeled "advanced" then so be it. We have to accept the reality of where Linux is and tackle that head-on, not heads-in-sand.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
An OS that is secure has more of a chance to be heuristically easy-to-use, than one that isn't. The goal of the OS is to provide functionality to the user. If the OS provides a means for someone to inflict damage to another without protecting them then certain users are leveraging some of the usability to make the system harder to use for others. I term this "anti-usability". In this regard the functionality of a system should protect the user while allowing them to utilize all the functions necessary to complete his or her tasks in a proficient manner. An easy-to-use OS can gain popularity. This popularity does not bring insecurity. It is actually those with the most knowledge of the system's workings that threaten the security of the system. These few are the ones that threaten the security of the rest, [name your social analogy here]. A large user base does not mean are large population of deviants. When designing an OS, an application, a weapon, or a can-opener, its important to keep those who are affected in mind. If the product is easy to use (ignoring distribution, market-ploy etc) then more and more people will use it. If the product is "anti-usable" then the product will be used in a more and more nefarious manner. If the system has a high easy-of-use (and possibly wide spread use) and a high "anti-use", then the system can negatively affect those that use the system for its original intent. It lays on the shoulders of the designer then to ensure that the system can only be used in a manner consistent with its original intent.
alright :) you know what i meant.
Pessimists are never disappointed.
[this sig has been trunca
Tons of apps require writes to the registry to function... All versions of Quickbooks as a quick off the top example. It's stupid stupid stupid. I'm not a MS fan but they're security problems aren't completely their own fault. If they were smart they'd use that monoplistic power for good rather than evil and force third party software vendors to write more secure stuff. I do IT work for an accounting office and they'd like to lock things down and can't because of stupid shit like this.
"is not giving any application run by a user permission to change ANYTHING other than minor configuration options without authenticating each application individually."
Windows 2k and beyond does this. If you want to modify something you have to use the admin password. Problem is there are so many other windows holes that this isn't a real stopper on windows.
Evolution or ID?
The thing that Microsoft has done security-wise is that it's developed its own standards for doing admin-type stuff. What Linux needs is a standard that gives the "are you sure?" question to non-techie users, even if they do have the root password. i.e.:
/*
rm -r
Are you sure?
this message would basically be the indication that you're doing something that's going to modify how the system works. Now, for software installs, the software install needs to be able to check all of the operations it's going to do, and ask the "are you sure?" question if anything needs root access. Standardize these two things, and Linux for the average person will be happy.
As far as services, etc, go, leave it the way Linux does it - it's the right way! Don't turn anything on until it's needed. Yeah, Joe Luser is gonna whine that he has to try something and fail because the service isn't turned on, but it's better than having to unplug your machine from the network jack because you can't figure out which useless service is letting intruders in.
Honestly, most users would learn a bit by using a typewriter, a calculator, and some pigeons in place of their computer anyway. Although, they're probably the same users that need a CERT advisory to keep them from jamming the typewriter by placing badly-folded recieved papers from the pigeons. (mental image: a malicious raver-lookin' dude making michevious faces while folding paper and attaching the sheets to pigeon's legs)
So given a task, what are the appropriate program_names? A GUI OS would typically have a hierarchical view of program_names.
Commercial editors generally check spelling. Slashdot editors on the other hand ... well, nobody is really sure what they do, but they don't check spelling.
So, I think it's pretty safe to assume that the answer to your question is the former, rather than the latter.
Philosophers of the future may ask, how many unsupported assertions can dance on the head of a post? This post for example:
/. posts.
1. Asserts most people could never develop the talent to write a book.
2. Asserts that natural language is stable even though we don't all speak latin.
3. Asserts that language is natural, even though there are thousands of incompatible variations. (Sex is natural)
4. Assumes humanity evolved over millenia
5. Assumes language is less "important" than vision.
6. Assumes there are plenty of taglines with pretty ASCII pictures that cheat character limits on
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Newly installed operating systems with known vulnerabilities are vulnerable to worms even before the user on dial-up can manage to download and install the service pack.
The easier you make something, the more likely it is that an inexperienced and/or incompetent person will feel that they know how to use it -- and increase the likelihood that they will make a mistake.
On the other hand, the harder you make something, the more likely it is that an experienced and/or competent person will make a mistake inadvertently.
The sweet spot for danger seems to be:
Hard enough to make mistakes possible, but not hard enough to make mistakes obvious.
For example, let's say you need to set up a network card.
If it's so difficult to do that you need to be extremely knowledgeable just to bring the card up in the first place, you will make lots of mistakes, but you'll have to get everything perfect to get it working -- which means you won't have random incorrect settings or unnecessary options selected (if you did, it wouldn't work.)
If it's so easy to do that you just click a button and the network card comes up, then you don't have any opportunity to make mistakes.
Split the difference, though -- click a button to launch the network card, but provide thirty little options that may or may not be necessary to change -- and suddenly mistakes become likely, and you might go a month using a configuration that "works", but is (harmlessly) slower than it needs to be or (harmfully) woefully insecure.
GNU/Linux programmers need to make a choice: make it really, really foolproof, or make it strict and demanding.
Note: It should be obvious that, historically, UNIX leans toward the strict, Mac leans toward the foolproof, and Windows floats in the middle, which causes a lot of security problems. Don't believe me? Consider networking via NFS vs Rendevous vs NetBIOS...
Things that need to be expressed before my opinion:
:)
-Microsoft does not hire retards. Their programmers are skilled.
-IBM,Sun,Novell,etc, do not hire retards. Their programmers are probably equally skilled with Microsoft's.
-Linux was inspired by Unix
-Unix is a multi-user operating system originally designed during the dawn of computing for big iron mainframes accessible by client terminals via command line.
-Computer "users" at the time of the creation and dominance of Unix knew, more often than not, how to program, do shell scripts, etc. They were very computer-literate. To use a computer in that age meant you knew how a computer worked.
-Windows began as a (more or less) single user operating system intended to run on PCs, not mainframes, and is used more often than not by people who know nothing of programming, or how a computer works abstractly.
Before you jump to say that Microsoft produces crap code, think logically. The Windows O/S may be considered to be a history lesson for all the O/S programmers out there. Learn from it. Sure, they didn't invent the GUI. Sure they weren't the first windowing O/S. But consider that Windows is the first operating system to reach the level of adoption that it has. They have to support every common architecture, network protocol, hardware design, etc, in the world.
If Windows serves any purpose to you guys at all, it is to illustrate what works, and what doesn't. From their example, user stupidity has been illustrated. Never more than now have programmers been aware of the need to balance ease of use with covering for the ignorance of a user. From their example, we've learned that the user really shouldn't be trusted to be a good admin, that firewalls are a good feature to build into an O/S, etc etc. Microsoft has proven useful in studying the effectiveness of GUI systems and their pitfalls.
Don't sit and criticize Microsoft. Take the lessons they had to learn the hard way, and use them to make better code. That's essentially what Apple did with OSX, even though for them it was a lot easier - they don't have to standardize for all hardware and software configs. They offered very limited backwards compatibility, as ugly compatibility hacks aren't good to keep in code
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
You had me at "Krispy Kreme". ;)
Microsoft spends lots of money on usability studies. Ever wonder why the F5 key refreshes pretty much every MS app? This is, in my mind, what usability implies.
If the user is trained on a Windows environment, they will see parts of the environment as more-or-less user friendly. If they move from this to Linux, they will see the entire linux environment as non-user-friendly, until they learn the ropes.
Likewise, someone coming from linux/unix will probably find Windows horribly obtuse and inefficient, whereas a proficient windows user can do (most) of the same stuff a linux user can do and often in the same amount of time.
The main differences between these two OS's are, IMO, that Windows is lacking an adequate scripting language, and tries to keep users from doing damage to their systems. That being said, my windows box really doesn't try to keep me from damaging my system because I set it up not to--I know what I'm doing. Then, I spend the rest of my time working with other applications than the OS, many of which are open-source tools, that work just fine in either environment. From an end-user standpoint, I'm about equally happy with both, in reality...
> the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes
This is nonsense on many levels. It's just FUD.
Windows displaced DOS and Unix on desktops
because of ease of use and user friendliness.
Their entire corporation is built on what they
tell you Linux shouldn't be doing.
Vulnerabilities come from bad designs, short
sightedness, or cost reducing decisions on the
part of programmers, or (more likely in my view)
from design decisions forced on projects by
management.
It's most probably a rationalization by people
who are worried their part of the gravy train
is going to go away.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Can you really remember the last time there was a virus that did not take an action by a stupid user. I am talking about viruses in the classic séance, not the ones that rely heavily on social engineering as most of today's do.
The last one I remember that was not totally reliant on social engineering was the CIH virus, something the spread over time, then hammered everything in it's path.
OT I know, but my take is that if a company creates a user account that is balanced between usability while limiting the ability to do something stupid, then Linux will be fine. Windows does not do this, ergo you get stupid people with ability to do incredibly powerful action through sheer ignorance.
And I don't run backups, cuz' Im a perfessional! I don't care what Billy G. says, computers are never going to be easy to use for the mere mortal... ESPECIALLY the ones that like to "futz" because they think they are power-users. Until we get to the movie world... Where the system says, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
I see Windows as being so vulnerable for 2 reasons: (1) with such a large code-base and so many interdependencies, it is difficult to keep the quality "perfect", and (2) with such a large user-base, the number of eyes poking and prodding will naturally lead to more discoveries.
I don't see Linux adopting (1)-- even though it's probably a few gigabytes with everything installed, the base kernel is much smaller. When you separate the operating system from the utilities and keep the interfaces clean, you can build secure software. If you have every application you wrote executing in kernel mode so that your web pages load 10% faster, duh, you're going to have problems.
As more users switch to Linux, however, more bugs will be found, and M$FT will be happy to point them out for us. I don't see Linux developers as "better" than Microsoft developers, they're just working with different things in mind.
I had a professor once that claimed that just about everything that came on a computer was "part of the kernel". This is a mistake, IMHO. A kernel needs to be only large enough to provide an interface between applications and hardware. If Microsoft focused on this for a while and tightened the Kernel code, I think the rest of their problems would become easier (I mean really, how hard can it be to go through the IE code and fix the 1001 bugs it has now?)
</rant>
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I've heard of the myth of "security through obscurity" (i.e. hiding the key under the mat is secure because NOBODY knows it's there) but I have never heard of security through confusing the users (label the entrance door in chinese, I suppose).
Perhaps the poster is suggesting a new paradigm: security through UN-usability: if NOBODY can use a system then it should stay pretty secure. (Do you know any Atari ST 'sploits?) Heck, even if it isn't then who cares because nobody uses it.
Perhaps because it lost in the marketplace?
Perhaps because there is not a great market for CLI only computers? Even if they were sold at a discount?
Perhaps because the overwhelming majority of people who own computers that are both CLI and GUI capable choose to use the GUI to operate them?
More seriously, the question probably should be "user friendly for whom?" For you and perhaps many Slashdoters, the CLI is more user friendly -- at least for certain tasks. But the market indicates that for most people that is not the case.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Microsoft may be famous for security issues and for usability, but they are certainly unrelated.
For example, if I create a control-panel application that modifies the Apache conf file and runs apachectl on Apply, have I introduced security holes? Ofcourse not. Even if a guest runs this program, the permissions to do anything don't exist and Apply has no choice but the throw an exception.
Instead of giving up on usability because of fear, try coming up with user interfaces that lower the learning curves. Put in smart, secure defaults. Have an basic/advanced option to cut down on choices presented to users. Build common interfaces so an administrator can learn a new tool quicker. And we are still talking about *nix here, none of these tools have to divorce the text files and command-line tools to do this. If you want to get really fancy, have a output window that shows the user what is being done in the background.
Not that any of this hasn't been done already.
Ozwald
Windows was NEVER built with security/multiple users in mind. It just kind of was added on as an afterthought when they got into the networking game. The problem Microsoft has had has always been of one with backwards compatibility. Windows 3.1 apps had to be compatible with 95, 95 apps had to work on 98, and so on. That's why to this day any app you install is going to drop something into the /WINDOWS/SYSTEM directory. Applications for Windows were pretty much written assuming that they will have full access to everything in the system. In a lot of cases that's still true today (for instance, an HP scanner driver/program I installed won't work properly on any other account besides the one that installed it). .DLL's, write stuff into the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive, and other such important things.
/sbin, /lib, or /etc. Primary system files never need to be touched, nor should they be. If someone wants to change the look and feel of their shell or X, they can write the appropriate file into their home directory.
When you install a Windows app, it typically wants to go in and overwrite/add
Linux/Unix, on the other hand, has always, always always been about networks and shared access. And the apps have always been written as such. Users can install and run apps straight from their home directories without having to add or change anything in
I guess what I am trying to say is that Linux won't be necessary to "open up" as it becomes more user friendly because it and the apps that run on it have been written with the idea that it's a shared system. Give the user their sandbox to play in and don't let them touch the rest of the system. Saying opening up the system Windows style is apples and oranges because Windows was originally created with a single, trusted user in mind, and it's been impossible for Microsoft to extricate themselves from that trap they set way back when. If you want an analogy, take a look at SMTP. If it was originally built with distrust in mind would we be having the problems with spam we are today?
-R
MySQL has autocommit enabled by default.
See here.
The two topics do not *need* to be related.
simply put:
rsh vs. ssh
--ignorance was bliss.
OK, once more we are talking about Joe User aka Joe Six-pack and Aunt Tilly. Freely translated: "morons that use computers and only talk human languages like French and English".
;-)
Also, I assume we're not talking about people who have the luxury of once every few days having a sys-admin looking at them through their nostrils.
So, in other words, we're talking about people who are responsible for their own security.
What do you think? Would making/keeping security mechanisms really complicated make Linux more secure?
To me it seems a far-fetched extension of the security through obscurity myth. And it doesn't surprise me one bit this is a MS Admin belief.
Come on guys, blame it on the GUI
I think, therefore I am...I think.
increase the vulnerability. Look at Lindows. Its behavior was to essentially make it easy and have all users run as root. That makes it little better than windoze as anyone could totally dork the system or help a virus or trojan come right on in. I understand that there has been SOME improvement but still the option is left there for user-as-root.
I think that this should be absolutely proscribed in any and all linux distros. Make it as easy to use as you wish but NEVER EVER permit the option of user-as-root. FORCE people to enter a username and password that they will use and do not provide a root login icon in kdm/gdm/xdm. Make users login as user and then go superuser if they must, the way Mithras intended it to be.
If you make it too easy, as in reducing the steps needed to setup all the various system settings, then you automatically make it more vulnerable to both stupidity, error, and leveraged attack by malware.
It CAN be made much easier without needing to open the system to some sort of user-as-root nonsense.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I respectfully disagree with the thesis that ease of use and security are somehow directly related. They are IMO, at best, indirectly related.
Moreover, I think a lot of the MS Windows XX security issues stem more from derivation and ancestry than simplicity to use (the discussion of whether Windows is simple to use is a whole 'nother discussion!). That is, the roots of Windows is the PC, with the emphasis on "P", i.e., "PERSONAL". When Windows was spawned, the notion of multi-user was non-existent. Even Windows NT, XP, etc. is not really a multi-user environment. Soooooo, when Windows had to come up with "multi-user" architecture, the groundwork had been laid, and the whole multi-user framework has been layered on top of the "P", with all of the convenience functionality mostly intact (default root access to directory structures (anyone can download and install software)), e-mail's launching executables for those users with, by default, root privelege, etc.
Yes, these are artifacts of "ease of use", but the insecurity is not because of ease of use, but more because MS chose not to go back and re-craft the "single user" framework.
Just my $.02.
Lindows does not run as root! I know because I tried it! I wish more people would try Lindows and learn the truth!
It seems reasonable that there would be some degree of trade-off between ease-of-use and security. You can't have both zones maxed out.
However, you CAN have both zones minned out.
In the case of Linux, the security is very high, and the ease of use is middling. It seems reasonable that Linux could still make SOME progress in the ease-of-use area before it starts sacrificing security. And, if Microsoft is to be prevented from owning the entire industry, Linux better get cracking.
However, making it easy-to-use for technicians is different than making it easy-to-use for the hoi polloi. Non-techies will demand a degree of ease-of-use which necessarily sacrifices much (if not all) of security, largely because of their lack of technical education.
I propose that such people be given souped-up playstations, and that real computers for real mission-critical systems be maintained by the educated geeks who appreciate the robustness of secure systems.
But thats just me.
Will making Linux more usable decrease its security? It doesn't have to, but it will.
l l_interface_complexity_is_very_hard_ (program complexity is part of the cause of bad security)
Writing a program is easy (relatively)
Writing that program so it can be used easily is sort of hard.
Making it easy _without_hiding_functionality_or_increasing_overa
OSS developers will likely never take the time needed to research, design and test their interfaces to make them as good as they could be.
Linux is also at a serious disadvantage in the interface arena because there's no one that can set a standard for interfaces. A standard is important for any platform because learning one application then makes learning others that much easier. Linux is not likely to every have such a standard outside of projects that create whole suites of applications.
One possible help could be tools like the NeXT/Mac OS X interface builder. It wouldn't make it easier to research or test, but it would be easier and faster to implement any design, so OSS devs would be more likely to spend time on testing at least.
I think GNU has an interface builder clone, but I doubt that anyone uses it. I mean, why should OSS care about usability?
Look, the reason why Macintosh is decent at security where other OSes fail is that 'root' is NOT required to run games, or record a DVD. RedHat 7, 8 or 9, start cdrecord (xCD-BURN), and it asks for the Root password. That's just plain nuts from a security standpoint.
That's why I'm very excited about the NSA Linux kernel extensions (there is no root, only levels of authority). This will give to Linux what Mac already has, and what all 'secure' Operating Systems need.
--
Even under NT, if someone doesn't need to belong to the 'Administrators' group, then this cuts the spyware, malware and virus installs my more than half. Cut PowerUser access and your down to a few percent of bad things that can happen.
But game manufacturers keep putting out games that won't run without Administrative access.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Does decent usability necessarily imply the presence of vulnerabilities?
Just because that's the broad experience of users with the current environment of "usable" administrative tools doesn't necessarily mean that it must be so. It's empirical evidence based on a sample size of ... well ... approximately one company.
However.
It is a caution. It shows that it is quite possible to (unintentionally) make system administration more unsafe when pursuing a single-minded goal and when the ideas for EZ system administration aren't subject to the kind of open scrutiny and community improvement that FOSS developers can provide. When a single company owns a market, it's tempting for them to "speed up" the standards process, to "innovate", and make something Really Great that later, turns out not to be perfect.
Practically, I've been encouraged that the free mail clients and free web browsers I use under Linux haven't been afflicted with "Automatically Run This" features of convenience to the degree that my Outlook and IE running friends have to contend with.
I will say though, that I've been nervous about various things that "wget something; cd something; make" redcarpet like packages and their potential for abuse.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There are a number of things which contribute to usability but I think one of the most important is consistency. Historically, Apple's human interface guidelines have made Mac applications more consistant from one developer to another than what you find on other OSes. This principal not only applies to the GUI, where you want common commands to always be in the same menu, with the same keyboard shortcut, from application to application, but it also applies to the command line where you want arguments to be formulated in the same way from one program to the next. Achieving such consistency is a matter of top level management. You need as many developers as possible to follow the same guidelines as each other. Ideally, you want someone or some group to review all the many development efforts and see that they follow good practices consistently. Such management would not only look for consistency but also look for common programming mistakes like buffer overflows. Linux developers are implementing some top level management (in a decentralized sort of way) but perhaps they should consider more. In a nutshell, good programming practices improve usability and security at the same time.
If your claims are true than be professional and list these ease of learning via CLI over GUI.
Otherwise, be like most of the folks who write without substance.
At least you understand it's not an "MP3 virus" or some kind of issue with iTunes, as others believe.
1. All Mac OS and Mac OS X applications have always been able to have any icon.
2. All Mac OS applications and all Classic/Carbon applications under Mac OS X, have always been able to have any name...including misleading names.
I would hardly call this a "deep-rooted, system-wide flaw". What does a Linux command-line executable "look like"? And indeed, it, too, can have any name, yes? Is that also a "deep-rooted, system-wide flaw"?
In fact, this item is revealed as the application that it is in every Finder view *except* icon view (which is also how it will appear on the desktop). Even a simple Get Info reveals that it's an application. The "solution", if one is needed, is to visually badge and/or identify something as executable, possibly with some small addition to its icon, as is done with aliases.
But no, this is not a "flaw" any more than it's been for the last two decades. (And for the market share number enthusiasts, this EXACT same "technique", as it were, was possible during the heyday of Mac market share as well. In fact, it's probably been "exploited" countless times. That's because the "exploit" is nothing more than tricking the user into running something they shouldn't.)
Usability frequently means reducing options to the user and streamlining advanced functions. For example, how many windows users know what to do with a command prompt? Most companies running windows disable the command prompt because it is not needed for the average user.
Fewer options and less user access to advanced features may increase the security of the system.
The user interface can be viewed like a protocol. The underlying framework makes more of a difference to security than the asthetics, form or content. Linux isn't secure because it was originally designed as "not usable". It is secure because it (and it's components) was designed as a multi-user system with security in mind.
The absolute demonstration of this is to compare windows 2000 with MS-DOS. Which is more "usable" and which is more secure?
Well, when I started using linux, I couldn't get on the 'Net with it (winmodem grrr) - so *that's* secure, yeah :P
In all seriousness, usability and power do not have to come with inbuilt insecurities - look at a pro knife (Stanley, or something)
It's both more powerful, and more safe, compared to an ordinary kitchen knife
Moving away from metaphors, to take something like a MUA (Evolution?) or a browser (moz?), what are the points of failure? Most of these - surely - ar at points that end users don't actually want to use -, say, loading images from other sites, or randomly executing a random attachment
Enabling these holes isn't what makes something easier to use - modifying, say, 'add sender to address book' *whilst* ensuring that that isn't itslef a new vuln. is what counts
http://milkshake.dexy.org
hmm.. Good one I think.
:D
:D
The problem is, I think, that most (server) applications are set up with some sort of expert using a console interface in mind.
Windows applications on the other hand, are set up with a graphical interface in mind.
With linux applications, I usually find that to make it as secure as possible and tweak all settings you simple cannot do with a graphical interface. Might be the interface, but in windows you also see people exploring the registry.
I think in time, on linux, when configurations get less cryptic and default settings get more usable in most situations (in which the community is already doing a great job btw) most common things can perfectly be done by a graphical interface (I already see myself adding virtual domains to my webserver by linux-config-httpd).
But in the end, the problem always remains (the way I see it): The end user always wants something different than the rest and thus, the administrator wants something different than can usually be done by graphical interface. So you need a console (or registry).
Ofcourse, doing something different than the rest, is what our commerce exists from. What else could be a reason to choose one product above another
Ofcourse, there'll be dozens of other ways of looking at this, thus: Happy discussing
Kind of makes you never want to got krispy kreme for donuts now doesn't it.
I think that the risk today is greater just because it's not user friendly.
Let me explain
example: KMAIL
When this nice tool shows an email in html format to "joe user", it desactivate certain dangerous tags such as REFRESH (and many others) that should never appear in emails (i.e. brings nothing to the readability of it)
Now, with the problem of worms, Linux is still left untouched because of the user base that is much more "IT knowledgeable" and the diversity of tools that make the writting of worms more difficult.
...but that's still not enough !
Any worm could easily destroy the user's data if an attachement is run without control
OTOH, if the user is granted with a nice interface when the attachement is clicked and instead of saving it right in the home directory, why not running it in a sandbox (chrooted), with limited ressources (ulimit) etc.
This could be the best of both world : better security and more user friendly !
Please read this, then use Gnome 2.6! You will see that your comments are -1, obsolete!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
Makeing Linux totaly point and click and simple to configure would not make it less secure. (Please note I don't want to see what I just wrote actually happen). If we can be honest and stop trolling for a seccond recent versions of windows have had the potential to be very secure. Most these huge worms and the like we becasue machines were badly misconfigured and we running al sorts of services that were not needed by those users. The rest of the big windows holes have been result of people being loged in as Administrators all the time. Granted wholes such as the one in the help system should not happen but, they really can't hurt you if you are not an admin or a power user.
This issue here is that if you make it easy people just sit down and use it. If you don't make it easy they have to read the documentation and while they are learning the bare minimum of how to do the setup they also get the theory of how to do it right. GNU/Linux could be a security night mare if you let some noobie build your server, and he makes the permissions on everything 777.
The thing many windows users do stip stuff like that becasue its easy enough for them just to click around unill it works. Most *nix users don't do stuff like that because all the noobies can even figure out how to login untill they read the docs, and when they do the learn what stuff is for and how it *should* be used.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The big problem with Windows is it's basic design: it's not modular. Just about everything in Windows is interdependent on something else.
UNIX (and Linux, being based on UNIX) has far more modularity built in. Do you absolutely need a GUI to run a server? Must you have KDE if you want to use WindowMaker?
With Windows, when a security hole is found, it often takes months to fix, since Microsoft has to figure out every aspect of their software which is affected by this bug - and even then, their patches tend to not fix the entire problem.
This isn't necessarily the cause of being user-friendly, though. Rather, it's the *way* Microsoft chooses to implement user-friendly - in the least efficient manner possible.
Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. They claimed making Linux a friend of Joe User will require it to 'open itself up' and become more susceptible to attack.
Spoken like a true MSCE. No, making Linux more usable will not open it up any more than necessary. One just needs to make sure that there isn't 1. a scripting host with direct access to the OS configuration, 2. all ports open by default, 3. lots of services open by default, 4. all user accounts with root access by default, 5. applications that can call the scripting host unecessarily (can we say Outlook running VBS attachments on open in the scripting engine with Admin privileges on a default installation?). None of these things really effects users. The two main ones that would affect users are 1. installation programs - just make installers call for an admin password when installed on default-configured accounts - which is what RPM for instance already does - and 2. make passwords mandatory (is that such a usability hardship?)
I think the notion of "User Friendly" should include more than just "easy to use". To me, a chainsaw is "easy to use" (just pull the cord and point it at what you want cut) but not "user friendly" because it's very easy to accidentally injure yourself, or others, or simply mess up the job you were trying to do if you're not an "experienced user".
If the chainsaw could detect that it was going to cut through human flesh and would shut itself down, or if had a screen that asked what angle you wanted the cut and how deep and then a robotic mechanism performed the cut exactly right, it would still be both easy to use (in fact, easier to use for the inexperienced user) and also more "user friendly".
Of course "experienced users" would be annoyed by the new interface and how long it took to specify the cut correctly and sooner or later someone would need to use a chainsaw to cut through someone's leg that was trapped under a fallen car or something and it would refuse to operate, costing this person's life... but it would be more user friendly.
There are plenty of other examples where making software more usable can make it more secure. I've used PGP before, which most of the time, is a pain in the ass, since I have to run all kinds of separate programs to generate keys and encrypt my text which I then have to paste into my mail program (yeah, I know, some have it built in, but mine doesn't [and yes, I know, you can get a hack to get Mail.app to use GPG, but it uses undocumented API's that are subject to change with each release of the OS]), and then do a similar amount of work when receiving mail. Apple's Mail can use X.509 certificates for S/MIME, which is pretty easy to use, although getting a key is somewhat difficult and undocumented. When I was working for a company which used Lotus Notes, however, signing and encryption were incredibly easy; in fact, your emails were signed and encrypted without you even knowing it, if they were sent to other Notes users on the same network. Now, Notes had problems of it's own, but that's the way security should work; it should be completely transparent to the user, so the user can work securely without having to worry about it.
The real danger with usability is making some of the software usable, while making the security features hard to use. This is the problem with Windows. On Windows, it is really easy to run an executable, but fairly difficult to tell that you're running an executable. On Linux, you don't have this problem because it's hard to run an executable, but it would be equally secure if you could easily run an executable, as long as it was clear that you were running an untrusted executable. For one thing, both Windows and the Mac need to do away with this file extension hiding business. If you can easily name an application Foo.mp3.exe and hide the .exe part (or Foo.mp3.app on the Mac), then it will always be difficult for users to tell that it is an executable, not an mp3 file. In fact, when double clicking on an application for the first time, the operating system should probably display a warning dialog saying that the application may be untrusted. This wouldn't effect most apps that people use, since they would only see that once, and then the operating system would remember that that app had been run. But it would make sure that if someone is double clicking a file that they didn't expect to be an application they would be warned, and would have the option of canceling that operation.
Vulnerabilities are created by bad programming, they are not necessarily linked to ease of use. Linux can continue to become more and more user freindly without running into the same problems that Windows has. Applications can be integrated without opening up holes in common libraries. Linux developers can learn from the mistakes of the past (uh, windows) and make sure to avoid the patterns that cause holes in the architecture. Linux usability can continue to improve without needing to 'dumb it down' or 'userify' it as I would say. An example of annoying windows userification:
My Documents
My Pictures
My Music
etc...
The 'My' in those file names adds no value to the idea of a documents or music folder. Of course they're mine, they are on my goddamn computer! Oh, then there's that 'My Computer' link... How could My Computer by on My Computer's desktop??? These are the things I used to ask myself when forced to use windows to access the corporate email client (lotus notes, another boundless bastion of usability). In OS X, some nice usage patterns are applied to the default filesystem, but the 'userification' is avoided by a clean heirarchy with clear names: System->Users->Documents This makes sense to a novice as well as an experienced user. Userification can be classified as anything that does nothing to help novices and makes experienced users feel like they are working with a system designed for someone who is develomentally retarded from a technical aspect. Another thing to avoid would be a completely disgusting default color scheme and cartoony window decorations. But these things have little to do with real usability. Integrated applications and clean, intuative interface controls are much more important. Ease of installation and configuration of OS components and applications is very important. There is no reason why improving any of these things should introduce vulnerabilities. As long as these features are not being hacked into the system in a ass backwards fashion, there should not be a problem.
TallGreen CMS hosting
The problem with Windows is that it's *too* secure. Yeah, you heard me. Try using a Windows box without admin rights. I did, once, never again. It was some time ago so I can't remember what the problem was. And you can't just supply the Admin password, you have to logout, kill all your apps, login as admin, do what you were trying to do in the first place, if you haven't forgotten because of some other app whinging about losing data or something, logout again, restart everything....it just isn't worth it.
So with Windows you have to run as admin all the time, which is why trojans can get in so easily. Win9x effectively runs as admin all the time anyway unless you have a fancy administrator who configures it for you, which most home users don't.
If "user friendly" = "run as root by default" then yes, Linux would end up having the same problems as Windows. But it doesn't have to. Prompting for root password when attempting a privileged operation is one possible solution; if a trojan attempts to run and the root pw prompt appears, hopefully the user will be prompted to think "er, why did clicking on that MP3 cause a root prompt?" and give the game away. I'm sure there must be other solutions.
It depends what you mean by increased usability. A linux expert can do almost anything on Linux right now. Aunt Tillie can't check her e-mail, without risking creating an open SPAM proxy. Increasing usability has very little to do with the underlying code functions, and far more to do with the visual communication of relevant information. As long as the interface does not rely on security through obscurity, improving the interface will only improve security, with things like:
"Warning: Setting Up a SendMail Daemon without checking for security patches may risk increasing the world supply of electronic Junk Mail (SPAM). Perform check for securely signed patches (Default: Yes)? Use Default trusted patch Server patchserver.ThisLinuxVendor.com (Default: Yes)?"
Of course, increasing accessibility also increases accessibility to potential shoot-yourself-in-the-foot things like filesharing. Right now, Security through Obscurity usually protects Aunt Tillie from setting up a SMB share of her entire hard drive. On the other hand, if she does do it somehow, she'll never figure out that her DSL is slow because she's been turned into the leading WAREZ distro for Podunk. Security through Obscurity is generally considered harmful-- but it is Security. Good interfaces can be designed to provide the users with warnings to educate them as to hazards, while letting them shoot themselves in the foot if they really, really want to.
Now, if you talk about increasing the functionality, so the Linux users can do things like install spyware, or DirectX components to reformat their hard drive, then yes, that's likely to decrease security.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I'm pretty sure that if you ask any security expert, they'll tell you that obscurity is not security. In other words, if you're relying on poor usability to protect you from intrusion and other bad things, your software is not secure.
Indeed, I'd take that a bit further. An interface that's difficult to use may be a security liability. Administrative tools which are difficult to use are far more likely to flummox legitimate administrators than to dissuade some curious kid with time on his hands or someone bent on doing some real harm. Bugs are less likely to be spotted and fixed if the software is hard to use in the first place. And prospective customers are less likely to be able to decide whether a tool really does what it claims to do before they buy it.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of relatively secure programs out there with lousy user interfaces. And there are surely plenty of pretty, easy to use programs that are full of holes.
But really, if you have to rely on ugliness to increase the security of your software, what does that say about your code?
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(0wnz3d)
this entire discusssion to me is little more than a variation on a theme: security through obscurity
the obscurity here being the clueless admin being unable to mess around with settings he or she shouldn't be messing around with without an understanding of the implications
so, insert your own argument for/ against/ around security through obscurity here, and it applies to this discussion, and encapsulates it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Great way to "sell" a product that I'm hearing - calling the users stupid. In way, though, this attitute guarantees that I'll be employed forever. When I'm dealing with an angry CUSTOMER, I look like a winner just because I'm willing to listen to their problem and deal with them as the reasonably intelligent people that most of them are. They're looking for answers from a person who will treat them with respect, and I'm just the person who will help them out. Thanks!!
Doesn't mean sacrificing security.
I also found that Linux wasn't that much different from Windwos
As far as useability went.
It is I guess like anything you do.
You have to learn how to use it.
And like everything there is a learning curve.
We all know that Micro$oft Corp. is after the bottom line.
Linux, as long as it remains open source will continue to be scrutinized for bugs, and or ways to innovate and optimize code.
Should Linux follow suite to Micro$oft then I think we would see degredation of good coding practices.
As far as which is more secure, I would lean toward Linix.
Because the user has so much more control over the kernel
it is bound to be more secure.
Though no code is 100% bug free.
Both OS'es will have their bugs, flaws or what-have-you.
I took the leap to Linux a few years ago, and have never once regretted giving the OS a try.
I look forward to the inovation the open source community brings to computing.
And cannot wait for the day when I can contribute to the open source initiative.
Three cheers for Tux.
BTW I've learned more about computers in general since using Linux than I ever had using Windows.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
This question sounds like, "If I drink, will I have a car accident?" Well yes, but only if you're stupid and drive after you drink.
Adding easy usability is not a direct cause of poor security, rather, an indirect cause. Increasing usability usually means pre-configuring options and features for the user. As Microsoft has learned with XP-SP2, the defaults are a big part of it.
It's difficult to imagine all of the permutations of configuration a user might do, while believing it to be secure, and then to code that to configure everything the way they want, and to keep it secure at the same time. However, if you're going to expose these abilities to the user through a simple user interface, difficult or not, you have to plan for it.
When there is no UI, the documentation is the authority on whether the user is secure or not. The user has to follow the directions, config themselves, and if they mess up, it's their fault. Creating simple UIs to do this for the user means you are expecting them to do more while reading less documentation.
This does not make the user more liable for his stupidity, instead it makes the programmer more liable for the security.
The moral is: Don't add the UI unless you've considered all of the possible configuration and security side effects and you're willing to deal with them. It can be as simple as error messages that explain to the user that certain combinations of choices creates an insecure condition and a suggestion to RTFM before continuing. That puts the liability back on the user.
Another viewpoint is that adding easy UIs to a program that previously had none should make it more secure - because the UI provides the opportunity to proactively warn the user before they do something stupid. It's up to the programmer to take advantage of that opportunity. Having only a binary, documention, and config files means the user must be proactive and read the docs.
Bottom line: The UI can't possibly create more security vulnerabilities than no UI whatsoever already afforded the user. The only way it does that is by encouraging a clueless user to touch something they wouldn't otherwise touch. And that's a conscious desicion the programmer made and didn't bother to plan for in the form of security warnings attached to bad configuration choice events.
Windows is a victim of it's own simplicity. Microsoft can only combat this with better default settings, better UIs with more knowledge being passed to the user, and lots and lots of security patches.
# Erik
As a result anything that wants to break down security has no barriers to it beyond whatever the application provides. That is insane.
You can vastly improve security by separating these spaces, making applications run in the user spaces as much as possible, and requiring authentication to bridge the spaces.
UNIXen have done this for decades. You might argue that "UNIX is hard to use." That has generally been the case, but not universally. MacOS X does a pretty good job of providing a smooth interface on top of UNIX and does so without breaking down the UNIX security structure. Users do not run applications in privileged mode without authentication, for instance. If you want to install new capabilities, you must authenticate to do it. Thus it is difficult for viruses and malware to insinuate themselves.
If the application and OS data is not writable by normal users, and they must somehow authenticate to get write privileges, viruses have a much harder time propagating.
It is for this reason that more and more UNIX software that used to run in the old days (e.g. ftp) now runs as an unprivileged user now. You can break in through flaws in the application, perhaps, but the damage you can do is limited. This was a good security practice that became mainstream back in the 1980s.
Getting back to "user friendly" systems, the Mac is not even the best example of a nice user-friendly UNIX box. I'd argue that some of the network appliances are much better at it. I had a Cobalt box, for instance, that had a fine point-and-click web interface to UNIX system management. It was really easy to use; you didn't have to know squat about UNIX, or even that the box was running UNIX. And it required authentication for every change request. This was mediated by the browser so it wasn't even noticed by the user.
Or just look at the Tivo. Is Tivo easy to use? Oh yea. How many security problems have you heard of with Tivo boxes? None, because getting unauthorized software onto that box is a bitch. Hmm. Maybe it's possible to be both easy to use and very secure.
I note that you can set up a Windows box to be pretty secure if you want to. I used to do it as a matter of course. The problem with doing that is that there is no easy way to run an application as a different user, which means you have to bounce back and forth between the Administrator login and your user login. This was a royal pain in the neck in NT and 2K, although in XP it's pretty easy (but not nearly as sweet as it is on MacOS!).
Unfortunately Microsoft has never promoted this configuration as best practice. In fact, they've implicitly discouraged it by making it hard to create a system that separates administrator and user spaces. There is no installation system that takes authentication into account, much less tries to enforce it. And they've actively promoted wide-open systems by shipping them that way by default.
Because Microsoft does not even try to ship systems configured relatively securely it's no surprise that many applications do not operate correctly if installed on a fully secured system. That is unforgivable now that they've had Windows with security out there for eleven years. They should have steadily increased default security to force application vendors to use best practices.
When my daughter's account has to have administration privileges to run her Winnie The Pooh game, it really is not a surprise that there are a lot of these problems. And that is blame we can lay squarely on bad configuration practices promulgated by Microsoft more than any requirement to make the software easy to use.
If Microsoft really were interested in security then the next OS release would ship
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
As I have seen a few times so far, Linux and Windows have traveled different paths in their product life cycles. Microsoft was born out of usability and friendliness. A pretty (to some) GUI with easy to use features (some what) with all the built in functionality you could ever need (and Bill said 640K would be all we'd need...). By lumping so much into an Operating system (which is inheritantly large to begin with - generally) you will definatly find yourself facing issues of Security.
Linux is different. Linux started out with a security mindset. Make it secure and let people figure out how to make it work. So with that as its roots, it was able to grow from there, and that focus on security is still there.
There is also a different community feeling with Linux as opposed to Windows. With Linux you have the Kernel changes and OS changes and what not, and that gets released for trail before an official release is made. And there is an avid community that tries out the latest and greatest and bugs are fixed and issues resolved before a release is mad public. That is not to say that there are no bugs and vulnerbilities found later on, but at least a good deal of things can be caught prior to general acceptance and use. On the flip side we have Windows that makes a SP release or an version of the OS avaialable, we download or buy the newest and run it only to find out later there are a couple thousand bugs that have yet to be fixed and we will have to wait 4 months until it is resolved in the next SP release. Or even better, a vulnerability is found, a worm/virus comes out to attack that exploit, MS then releases a patch/hotfix, then we run around trying to figure out which machines have been compromised and fix them.
Linux has come a long way in its usability, which I think is great. And if Microsoft is any clue, I think it is easier to add usability to a secure system then it is to add security to a newbie friendly OS.
That's just my two bits...
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
If popularity breeds vulnerability, Apache should have far more vulnerabilities than IIS. It doesn't.
According to the study Slashdot posted, THEY DO.
Guess you missed the breaches of Debian, Gentoo, Gnome, GNU, etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If usabillity and insecurity go hand then the most user frendly item is the most insecure. I proclaim this "most user friendly" item to be minesweeper. Now, how insecure is minesweeper?
So you mean to say that you can be both user friendly and rock solid secure? IIS is hacked much much more often, but Apache has market share.
The simple fact that just because more people know the system doesn't mean more people can hack the system. With Microsoft products the more you know the more you realize some of the huge holes which exist in the system. With Linux no huge holes present themselves. Get a person who knows Linux Servers and Microsoft Servers like the back of their hand. They will be much more likely to be able to hack the Micorsoft Server.
The question is not usablillity, its knowledge of flaws. No flaws, no knowledge of flaws. I'm not saying that there aren't flaws in Linux, but I am saying that the flaws in MS products are much much larger.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Given that you're comparing a pair of synonyms against a pair of antonyms, it's easy to get confused. Which describes 85% of the semantic arguments around here, I'm afraid.
I'll go one better, and claim flat-out that you can have both, and they're not playing a zero-sum game, bearing in mind that there's no way a system can be made either 100% secure (*cough*LONGHORN*cough*) or 100% convenient ("Okay, I plugged in the computer and turned it on. Where's the document that I'm thinking of?")
Imagine the computer as a house. It's a place where you keep your stuff. (Yes, kids, here comes the analogy!)
Within that house, usability is a matter of placing light switches and doorknobs so that they're both within easy reach and easily recognizeable as such. It's a matter of leaving a clear path between rooms, unblocked by furniture. It's a matter of making doorways large enough (or using furniture thin enough) that you can moving things around if you must. To the person that lives within it, usability is a matter of making as much as possible convenient and accessible.And within that house, security is a matter of sturdy locks on the doors and windows that close firmly, without room to stick a credit card in. It's also a matter of denying spaces within to those that don't need it. It may involve locking certain rooms, or if those rooms must be left open, then locking those few cabinets that contain dangerous things (like bleach and ammonia) or putting those dangerous things up and out of reach. Security is as great as possible a deterrant against anyone outside the house who doesn't have a key or permission to be there, and safeguards within the house to keep the unwary from setting the curtains on fire with a misplaced candle.
(A third analogy could be made for attractive design: things that are pleasing to the eye. But those lend nothing to security, and may sometimes even get in the way of usability: curtains may obscure doors. Furniture may be quite comfy and eye-catching but still be in the way.)
In that way, it is possible to have a house be both secure and usable. It's maximizing and facilitating access to what may be used at any time, and minimizing or restricting access to that which could do more harm than good.
As for what this all has to do with software, everybody can figure that it. Besides, all I promised to do was provide the analogy. :)
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Usability doesn't require that you enable the system to do anything that it can't do today. All usability focuses on is making it easier / more intuitive to accomplish those same tasks.
Because that's really important. If glazed, I think a documented and rigidly tested security model will quickly overcome user error. If creme-filled, then clearly the user experience must be restricted in favor of a secure system.
For your post to be persuasive, you're going to have to reexpress it as an image or series of images which conveys the same argument. Good luck.
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it endlessly!
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche
opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember the Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all even more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see
any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated
web/filesystem browser. Slashdotters--ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with t
however it can be, Imagine a tool that made a mailserver / dns so easy to set up that you didn't have to know how IP worked. That is a security problem.
Having said that is that really usability? I personally don't think so, perhaps a real world equivelant would be knowing how to use a VCR without knowing how to plug it in (which is kindof bizarre).
Easily Exploitable: Windows 2000 IIS server is already running, out of the box.
--
Yet another example... if you want to watch a box get hacked very fast, Install RedHat 6.2 out of the box, and plug it into the Internet. I'll guarantee that a Win 98 box is not nearly as lethal. I give it two hours before it's attacking somebody.
Yet the much easier to use RedHat 7, 8 and 9 all came with Firewalling turned on as the default selection during install (something that would have saved the RedHat 6.2 box).
In the same category, many of us are not so patiently awaiting Windows XP Service Pack 2 - where the default firewalling will actually work. The "I don't know what I'm doing default settings on WinXP - will get a working firewall out of the box.
To my view (and I run a LOT of Linux/Solaris/HP-UX) everything that is more than 4 months out of patch is an open playground for hackers (and even more sad, script kiddies).
NONE of this accounts for the number of security flaws that are directly attributable to Outlook, Office and Internet Explorer (which are a category unto their own). To these, I would have to admit, the level of "ease of use" is attributed to "programming shortcuts" that lead to "security breaches" across software platforms. If each of these products were actually separate from eachother and the underlying Windows OS, then this wouldn't be as much of an issue either. Further, the interoperability of these things annoy many new users:
There's got to be a better way, and it doesn't have to be less secure.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
So far from all the replies I have read. A majority of you are right but your viewing it to narrow mindedly. The security issues with Linux, Mac OS and Windows is a combination of the following.
1) Human Error - THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING!! we are not perfect, NO operating system can EVER be secure. There will always be a hole somewhere that some body will exploit. There is no such thing as a 100% secure operating system because we all can ( and have! ) made mistakes in programming, setup and simply by using our favorite operating systems. Human error will always be there whether it shows up in our programming, our system administration or simply checking your email and not paying attention to the attachment. We have all made mistakes and it will continue until the day we die. The only computer that is 100% secure is one that is simply shut off and unplugged from a power supply.
2) User Simplicity - Making an OS easier to use has the posibility (Does't mean it will happen, just the possibility) that security flaws will arise. This goes back to human error and the complixity of the system that is being made simple to manage. Their is a balance between usability and security. Yes a certain component in linux could be secure but when you add an easier interface to the component increases the chance of insecurity through human error. Also the basic computer user does not know computer security and does not take the time or want to learn computer security. They just want everything to work when they want to use it. For us computer savy administrators and programmers commandline isn't much of an issue. For the basic computer user it is hard if not impossible to remember all of those commands. My Dad can't remember what url to type in to get to cnn.com let alone starting a service or program by typing in the name. He can use his computer just fine by icons because he doesn't have to remember a command and how it's spelled to use it. When I worked technical support for a local ISP there wasn't a day that went by that when I asked someone to click a mouse button they tapped the mouse on the monitor. That is an extreme look at it but the average user isn't that much more savvy.
3) Market Share - Fact is Fact however that Windows WAS full of holes and M$ is finally making it more Secure. If M$ had made these security strides back with Win 95 security wouldn't be as much of an issue. Linux was built from the ground up to run more secure than other OS's. But it is not without it's flaws that have not yet been discovered. Sooner or later someone will find these flaws. Due to Windows market share, it is all the more possible to find these flaws sooner than later. Windows on the other hand has started from the opposite end by being completely open to begin with to more secure today. Windows 2003 has been the most secure Windows platform ever. It wasn't without problem however andd As long as M$ continues to make security they're #1 priority it will eventually become just as secure as Linux and Mac OS. Anyone thinking that market share has nothing to do with finding flaws is retarded. Finding a needle in a huge haystack is really hard to do for one person but the odds change when you add more and more people to equation.
Fact is 100% of all virus, worms, trojans, etc exploit one contant. HUMAN ERROR. There is no question that Windows was full of holes and still has holes to this day. Now that M$ has made strides in they're security in Windows. Flaws are starting to show up in Mac OS. I love the Mac OS but I have seen more security holes in the news about Jaguar than any previous version. How many times in the past year has linux breaches been in the news? It's all been in the news more so than in previous years.
So the real question isn't who's more secure. It should be "When are we all going to quit making mistakes?"
We have our SMTP server set to delete encrypted zip files. It is somewhat of a hassle, but most people that we deal have been willing to resend as an unencrypted file.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Many exploits in the MS-Windows world are application-level exploits, ones that sacrifice security for "usability," for some definition of the term "usability." Many of these features are not really very good to start with (such as those regularly exploited by MS-Outlook worms and trojans).
MS-Windows has its own lion's share of OS-level exploits as well, but most of the annoying ones seem to be user-level.
Can Linux avoid these types of exploits? I believe so. The key factors for OS "ease-of-use" is consistency in application interface between similar applications, ease of software installation, ease of system maintenance, and a sane approach to UI design.
Note none of those require a dumbing-down of the system to suit the user. Basing file type on three letter extensions was just a stupid idea (but a holdover from the DOS days, so understandable); hiding those extensions was not only the act of a moron, but potentially dangerous. Requiring the user to jump through hoops to turn off autoexecute of inserted CD media is just as stupid. (I mean permanently, not just holding down the shift key.)
If Linux doesn't treat the end-user like an idiot, but still provides the services most users are used to, Linux can certainly become easy-to-use and maintain decent security. But it'll take concentrating on the basics: package installation as a user function (perhaps in their own directory tree), for instance.
I think Microsoft's security problems are based more on the way they do business: technical decisions are driven by marketing, not by the needs of the users.
Perhaps the development model of Linux will help avoid those pitfalls.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Why do people think that the command line [osnews.com] is *not* "user friendly"?
SNIP
Then why a system administrator?
You're talking about two different groups of "users". Most users are not system administrators in any significant sense of the word. Yes, home users are by necessity "administrator" on their machine... but they don't do much administration, and I don't think that what you're talking about.
Linux, as is, is fine for systems admins. It is not fine for Aunt Tillie types; I believe the increasing usability is targeted at the latter group.
Oh, and as an incidental aside...
Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!
Hell, sometimes you can have Windows, Linux, and even Mac administrators in the same *person*. Some of us are agnostic in the great OS holy wars. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Linux, on the other hand, has always been a multi-user system (well, it has since it became an OS, and not Linus's hyper-fast text editor). Because of this, and the unix philosophy in general, you'd have to go out of your way to find software that does not fit into the multi-user system model. Because of this, linux can remain more secure, even when giving it to 'joe user'.
Of course, the problem comes from the same third party vendors who don't get it in windows also not getting it in linux. Hopefully, they will know something about a multi-user system BEFORE bringing their wares to the linux world. Then again, the idiots creating cruft like 'bonzai buddy' will never get it, nor do they care.
I've noticed that Windows XP Home already has an idea of privileges. On my own machine, I've created a "root" account that has administrator access, and a user account that doesn't.
The problem is installing older win32 programs that assume you have write permission to all files on the filesystem. I stubbornly refused to give my user account administrator privileges, and the result was that I had to open a command prompt and use the "CACLS" command to give Users write permission to specific files and directories. Sometimes, this required a certain amount of trial and error to reverse-engineer how the program works.
Recently, I installed XP on my parents' computer, and I briefly thought of suggesting they make user accounts that have no administrator privileges, but I abandoned that idea right quick, when I recalled how much hacking I had to do, to get things to work.
However, when applications catch up with XP in terms of being aware of user privileges, hacking won't be required any more, and Microsoft will be in a position to start educating common users about the difference between an Administrator vs. User account.
I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that there are many things that I really like about XP and the direction it's taking.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Usability and security are not mutually exlusive. On the contrary the more usable software is, the more secure it is. The more the user understands the software and the more at ease he feels with it, the more secure it is, because the weakest insecurities in any system are the human elements.
For example, say some software mandates changing your password every day and does not allow repeats. Not very usable. The user will avoid this obstacle by writing down his passwords, figuring out a way to stay logged in, using easier passwords, or something else which compromises security.
If your definition of "more usable" is "more graphical and has more features" (seems like Microsoft uses this one), then possibly as usability increases, security decreases. However, true usability and security are both results of the same thing - good design.
I was having a similar discussion at a McDonald's last week. The discussion ran long so my friends and I hopped into my Toyota Matrix and continued our discussion at a nearby Denny's.
back in the (command line) BBS days, our BBS shell had a toggled user var called (appropriately enough) I'm Smart | I'm Stupid--the 'stupid' user got less options, and more verbose help onscreen--i've always thought this was a great solution to the dilemma of how to have a workable system for both experts and newbs--why not create a modern version of this setup that will show/hide information and options, based on the user's S/S preference?
I am nowhere close to a sys-admin for a linux farm, but from my POV, the needs to make Linux more user friendly focus on two things:
1. Making it easier to load and update programs
2. Making USB connections for PDA's and other peripherals work better in terms of hot-syncing.
I would be very happy to have a 75% improvement in loading and updating existing programs that didn't leave my system open like a windows machine, rather than a 100% improvement that did. (I would take 50%).
I need the PDA to sync without having to push buttons while being twisted around like a russian gymnast. Trying to push the hotsync button and launch the script at precisely the same moment is not OK.
Trying to load a program, only to find that I don't have some obscure file that should have come with the tarball, but didn't, is not OK. Hearing about the great features that the grand and glorious KDE 3.2 will do only to find out that KDE 3.2 won't run on my version of SuSE is not OK.
Fix these problems and linux will be just good enough (and that will be great and should be the desired target). Don't need more. Don't want any of the MS bells and whistles, especially when its these that cause the vulnerability.
How to acquire French cuisine in four simple steps:
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
With SELinux, it can be setup so that even root can't do anything it wants. Instead, there will be multiple administration accounts, each with particular permissions. The level of granularity is up to the users (or the distros), and with some experience, you'll see some pretty user-friendly installations with SELinux running (FC2 is coming up)
We'll soon be able to run apache securely, even with a gaping security holes that allow browsers to execute arbitrary code. We'll be able to download code and run it in harmless environments where privilege escalation is impossible and the bounds for operation are clearly set. And this will be the default setup for every linux user.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
It's a syllogism.
To me it's not about usability which will make it more insecure, it's the more corporate it becomes (i.e. Redhat, etc) which will bring about more vulnerabilty.
It seems kindof odd that a computer super expert would be able to discuss usability issues with any sort of authority. The simple fact thay they know computer systems so well makes them prejudicial to being human interaction specialists.
of course it will.
Broadened platform adoption is like gay marriage: whether or not you feel that this other set of users will end up with insecure systems, their existence doesn't make yours any less secure.
The more user friendly any OS is, generally the less secure it will become.
Usablility as joe use would want it would be a security vialation. joe user would be rely happy if he dint have to use passwords and if the file sharing alredy was enabeld so he could acess the files from every where. ive seen joe users getting mad about being prompted for passwors on osx aswell.
but there is always a trade of doing it the osx way with prompting for passwords and pherhaps a key ring
for less dangerus stuff would work.
That always makes me laugh, thinking about the guy who used to be the office flunky who knew how to unjam the old printer and does some lame-ass "Microsoft Certification" and now calls himself a Network Administrator...or worse yet a Network Engineer...!
- A lot of viruses exploit flaws in OS/application code, usually C/C++. These flaws are completely unrelated to usability issues, so increasing usability does not require these flaws to become more common.
- All other viruses are actually *caused* by usability *flaws*. This includes those viruses that come as
.pif or .zip files, and spyware that installs itself by instructing users to click "yes" on IE warning dialogs. The problem is not that users are stupid, the problem is that usability is bad. Truly usable software would always inform the user of the consequences of their actions in a way the user can understand, and not allow various ways of "tricking" the user into running something dangerous. Fixing these flaws increases usability and security.
- Bad usability can cause security breaches in other ways: users can be unaware that they just shared their entire hard drive to the Internet with write access, or that there is hidden information inside Word documents, or things like that. Usable software always informs the user of the consequences of their actions. Increasing usability increases user awareness of security issues.
- Increasing usability can increase code complexity, which means that there will be more bugs. However, the security problems fixed by the increased usability outweigh this, especially when safe languages are used so that code execution bugs aren't a possibility.
Usability is not the problem. Bloated, complex code in unsafe languages is the problem. The two are not necessarily associated. Increased usability increases security due to increased user awareness of security issues.main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
That's ill reasoning: "Windows is more usable, windows is less secure, thus usability means insecurity".
What really happens is that the lack of usability in Linux is the main cause of insecure setups.
I am sure most of you guys can manage the thousands of setup options and configuration files Linux has.
Not me. And not some other thousands of users.
As I occasionally use Linux, I have to rely on the default setup most of the times for most of the programs. But what happens when you need to change the default setup? Yo crawl through lines and lines of text till you find the f**ing line that changes the f**ing option you need to change. Before this, you have changed a dozen of some other options you are not really sure what are there for, just to try...
So, my conclusion is:
- Security problems in Windows are caused mainly by bad design.
- Security problems in Linux are caused mainly by bad usability.
... but my answer is: it shouldn't.
One thing I want to preface my full answer with is that I think people toss a lot of things under the heading "usability", without really knowing what it means. I, not really knowing what "usability" means (I have friends with Masters Degrees in Human-Computer Interaction, and there's no way I'd claim to know as much as them), I'll define it for the purposes of answering the question: "Usability" is the concept of making an application, OS, or other piece of software easier and more efficient to use through employing an intelligent and consistent graphical interface design. While I'm sure it entails more than that, I'll just talk about that much.
There.
Now for my answer: Usability has nothing at all to do in any way with the basic, underlying security of a piece of software, with one exception.
Although the issue gets more difficult to deal with as the complexity of a particular application, if we use the definition of "usability" above, it's pretty simple. An interface design shouldn't really ever be able to make an application less secure (now obviously if the interface application itself has underlying vulnerabilities, that's a different story). How you navigate, manipulate, and "use" an application or OS doesn't affect how secure or insecure the underlying code is. Except in one way...
The one way in which striving for better "usability" could make an OS or application less secure has to do with the interface used to administer security in that OS or application. If the interface design for that piece of the software is not as "usable" as it could or should be, the security of the application or OS could be comprimised.
Other than that, "usability" as a discipline isn't to blame for vulnerabilities. Microsoft does play the usability game really well. While a lot of it is subjective, it generally does a good job at making the interface consistent, efficient, and intuitive. Windows is also insecure. But that has only to do with more underlying, structural problems with the OS. Let's not confuse things like the Administrator rights requirement, for example, with "usability" issues; things like that are software design flaws, not interface design flaws, and I think acknowledging the difference helps in attacking the problems.
Better usability != less security. At least not always. If anything, it's my opinion that improved usability makes software more secure, in that it can make it easier to make software more secure with improved interface design. But that's just me.
this is slightly off-topic yet related...
i was arguing with my boss today that "open sourcing" our software product is gonna be something we might have to do in the not-so-distant future to compete with OSS offerings. one of his worries is that if we do this and switch to a charge-for-support revenue model (ala red hat) we would actually be providing ourselves with a dis-incentive to make our package easier to use. (the easier it is to use the less support is necessary thus our revenue stream would be lessened) does this make any sense? i have to admit that to me it kinda does. what do you think?
All popular OS's are written in C, and therefore, have the same vulnerabilities since C doesn't secure itself against programming errors. MS is a target, particularly recently, because their is profit in spam, and these virii are trying to set up a spam network. If you want to email a virus with an over 90% chance of hitting a machine of a particular OS, of course you choose Windows. This doesn't excuse Windows from their responsibilities of making their OS more secure. However, MacOS and Linux are not secure either, and shouldn't rely on their obscurity as a defense.
Those of us who do know what we're doing know how to install GCC and any other tool we might need.
Those who don't know how to install it probably shouldn't be compiling apps. They should be installing binaries using a GUI tool.
A typical user OS doesn't need a C compiler. Strictly speaking it's even a security vulnerability to have development tools on the machine.
Sounds to me like Fedora is a user-targeted OS rather than a techie/developer targeted OS. Seems wise to me.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
As others have mentioned, user level security is part of usability.
However, there are differences between ground up security and added-on as afterthought security.
Windows' prime security and usability flaw is that every user insists on running as root (with admin privileges). Security Check: Walk up to any computer in your building. Open a command-line interface. Go to filesystem root. Issue command that tells computer to delete everything. If it does it, then it is not being used securely - regardless of whether it could be used securely.
Windows' admins get proud of some pretty strange stuff. For example, they don't like the idea of having computers on all the time and really like people to turn off their computers at night. Why, do you ask? One reason that was explained to me by Windows proponent was that all those switched-off computers were invulnerable to hacking/virus/attack. I responded to this argument by saying that my stapler didn't get viruses, but it didn't do email very well even so.
Best security is simplest security. The more your O/S CAN do, the more it might be persuaded to do. If you want to discuss apples and oranges, we can compare W2K security with Linux router. Both are difficult to hack, but the latter is much more difficult. As Linux gets more and more market share, there are going to be more security hits, viruses, worms, and whatnot. Not doing Linux because this is true is like not doing email because you might get (will get) spam. We're grownups. We can do arithmetic. What gives me the most functionality for the least price, balanced against risk? Linux, period.
What was your IP address again?
I mean, I need it for security reasons.
The point isn't to ignore problems; the point was that there was no "attack".
The scare was all over an application that literally did nothing but display a dialog box, but was *presented* in such a way as to make it out to be a terrible, new, easily adaptable exploit that ostensibly took advantage of some fatal flaw of Mac OS X, when in fact it's just demonstrating that an application can have any icon and any name, which has been known, and possible, on the Mac platform for over twenty years.
Usability in its purest form means that the user has to jump through the fewest number of hoops possible in order to achieve their goals. Your programs can have streamlined menus, clear text, obvious buttons and intuitive guides and shortcuts without compromising security. Only in the case of default system settings do you see a conflict.
I would argue that certain things shouldn't work out of the box. Items such as your internet connection, terminal services (remote desktop), drive formatting (outside of the initial installation), and basically any other stuff that could kill your machine in a hurry should require a single additional step each in order to activate them.
Instead of enabling security holes the size of Texas by default, these items should have prominent, easy to follow displays which show you how to enable/disable and configure them (and perhaps a sentence on why it is disabled by default). When you click on them for the first time you should get a "set this up" wizard. You should also have the option of skipping the "wizard" style settings tool and go right a well designed advanced tool for those who know exactly what to change.
By making the act of enabling devices/services intuitive you are contributing to ease of use without sacrificing security. You are also promoting a sense of caution. If I need to take an extra step to turn something on, there is probably a reason for it. It also gets me used to how the system works and when there is a problem in the future, I'll have had the initial experience to help me resolve it.
That's my 2 cents worth at least.
--KS
Regardless of whatever Joe Blow installs, I'll always be installing Debian. And if Debian is compromised to suit Joe Blow, I can find something else.
You don't have the choice with Windows.
No, not true. What the parent poster was saying is that to cause a serious effect on your system, you will get an authentication dialog box that requires you to enter the admin password. Even if you have this password, it will make you think twice, or at least put some accountability on you. In Windows, if you log in as Administrator (as most home computers ship), the malware will install with no security prompting whatsoever, as your logon credentials are enough for Windows.
I'm never sure why but when the topic of usability comes up it is always assumed that usability means that you have to assume the user is a moron. MS makes that assumption. It is the default assumption in the MS world. MS knows your needs and expertise better than you do so MS assumes everyone is a moron and writs an O/S for morons. Making Linux more usable doesn't mean that the MS paradigm must be followed.
Kenneth
BAD NAME
How about if you take command-completion and apropos a level further, and pop up a menu for each successive logical item?
#cd Menu: burn | eject | play | mount |directory
You type the first letter, and it completes. You solve the problem of having to know what the commands are, because the commands are regular-language descriptors, and they're presented to you, just as they are in a mouse-clickable menu. (it could be mousable, too). You ease the problem of learning the syntax, because once you do a task a few times, you'll probably remember. If not, the options will always be there to hold your hand. It's a helluva lot quicker than clicking through 20 menus to get one task done, because you go directly from command to option.Click through (or imagine clicking through) GIMP menus (this diagram may help), then imagine if there was 1 simple little GIMP prompt waiting for you to:
Animation 'TAB' Menu: |O|ptimize |P|layback |U|noptimize
If you wanted to do the command again, 'up-arrow' your way to happiness. Use the 'graphical user interface' for graphics. Buttons to do things that are more complicated than simply giving instructions to the machine. Drag and drop the commands out of the console into a clickable well, use it to display persistant information. Take better friggin advantage of the power of all this 3D hardware, screen real-estate, and the rising level of computer literacy of the general public. Making it 'simpler' doesn't make it 'easier' necessarily. It's nice to have things to click on, but when you can have both, why not take advantage? -itomatoPerhaps the following:
There is a system-protected directory, which you need root access to write to, known as the "trusted applications directory." In order to put an application in this directory, you must enter the root password.
Any application run from this directory by $USER will have all of the permissions of $USER. This way, apps like mozilla/safari/office/etc can be installed by a trusted user once, and the users won't be bothered with a password prompt every time they want to save their homework or update their bookmarks.
Applications that run outside of this directory (or directories; you could have a system-wide and user-specific set of trusted dirs) would prompt for the user's password before they are allowed to write to the hard disk, and before they do anything that would require super-user access.
Thomas Galvin
...that laughed my ass off at someone thinking a question like that could be resolved on /.?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I can probably answer this - the main advantage to a GUI is ease of learning what to do without reading a manual. I don't know if you ever read some of the old DOS manuals, but they were written in a way that my Dad or Grandma would never be able to figure out what to do, so they'd try the hunt and peck method.
/lib/help: Permission denied
for instance...
Dad sits down to a computer for the first time ever and see this:
#linux>
In his head - What is the first thing to do? Maybe type a sentence?
#linux>Show me what you do.
Show: command not found
#linux>What the heck does that mean?
What: command not found
Hmm - looks like the first word I type does something. I should try help
#linux> help
#linux> linux
linux: Command not found
At this point, dad tries to read the manual, but it's all so much techno-gibberish that he is lost by the third page. He smashes monitor with his typewriter.
Icons:
Dad starts computer and sees a screen with three pictures and a menu bar with Start on it. He clicks Start, and some more pictures appear. He selects one of the pictures from the menu and it starts the program. He tries to click a picture on the Desktop and it does nothing. He's not really sure what to do with those, but he can run them from the Start menu, so he ignores them.
So what did we learn from this?
GUIs have multiple solutions to the same task while CLIs usually don't (aliases break this slightly, but require being a little less noob)
CLIs require directions to learn at least the basics, and often those directions aren't easy enough to understand for the computer illiterate.
GUIs facilitate learning by showing the options, where with CLIs you need to find the options, and then usually the options for the options.
CLIs have a lot of configurability that GUIs have, but not ease of learning. Even once learned, the options need to be remembered, where a GUI will put them all in front of you if done correctly, although it has a tendency to get buried in submenus (like Preferences).
The unix world has the advantage of starting with a lot of software designed to be used in a multi-user environment by non-administrative users. The Windows world is rife with the artifacts of DOS/Win16/Win9x/WinME software development which makes no such assumptions, with the result that it is considered normal by both users and developers to have and require administrative access. While this is slowly changing, it is a problem that unix-based environments won't have to face.
Of course, people will come out with things like Lindows and face them anyway, but it should be pretty easy for them to adopt the standard linux security model if they start having significant problems.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
AFAIK there isn't a graphical app to implement sudo (as there is for su, see kdesu etc.) But it does exist. sudo is very nice.
Sometimes I get the impression reading these posts on slashdot that people haven't used linux for a long time (if ever).
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine in the IT department of a company where I used to work was nearly fired for pressing the company to write user documentation for the company's purchasing system. The head of IT firmly believed that User Friendliness was a threat to corporate security.
It's nice to see that this sort of attitude hasn't changed much in the intervening time.
User Friendliness is platform and interface agnostic. It is a state of mind, not a set of tools, keywords, or icons. What works for the normal user might be inappropriate for the programmer or system administrator. Good UI design considers who the person is that's using the program, not try to apply one person's standards on all sorts of users.
One common problem I've seen is the "dumbing down" of an interface to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. This is just as bad as forcing everyone to use an obscure, hard-to-figure-out interface.
The best solution, in my opinion, is to give people a choice of both lowest-common-denominator and power-user interface, since even among a group of users, abilities differ.
A poorly designed interface is what gives rise to security problems. Another factor in security risk is allowing programs and system code to interact too closely together, as Windows does, with no effort made to enforce security restrictions. Thus, the problem isn't giving an email program an easy-to-use interface, but giving that email program abilities it shouldn't have had in the first place.
Catering to the lazy user (as opposed to the non-expert user) is another area where security problems may arise.
User Friendliness and Ease of Use is not the cause of security risks, and making Linux easier to use will not increase the security risk of using it. Security through Obscurity has never worked, and never will.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
If TV's and movies and video games are popular because we're a visual species, why do we spend so much money on music?
TV's and movies and video games are popular because they are 1) Easy and/or 2) Interactive. Sit, receive.
Your definition of precise is off. I think you mean that writing is much less descriptive. If meaning is easily lost, that's not precise - precise would be very little variation in interpretation - and in fact, sometimes you WANT writing to be imprecise, it's what lets the reader draw from their imagination.
But if you're trying to tell someone how to build a widget, you probably want precision. If you're describing what your girlfriend looks like (it's hypothetical, ok?), writing will only get you so far, as the reader is invariably going to have to fill in the details you've left out. A picture or diagram will be more precise in those cases.
You're sort of right on information - GUI's arn't popular because they're more space eficient (they're not) or more time efficient (they are), but because they are easy to comprehend. Your brain has a very easy time understanding big, small, red, green and blue. It has to jump through significantly more hoops to make sense of '1', '9', and '11', or "Your hovercraft is full of eels."
paintball
I personally find it a little insulting when someone replies to me, yet addresses a third person.
fs
Ignorance is never bliss when it comes to operating systems.
As far as I can tell, there is no word in everyday English that means 'being unable to speak the local language'.
This is quite a common occurance nowdays. Hop on a plane and within a few hours you can be in a place where you can't speak the local language. But we don't have any word for that condition.
Allow me to propose the new word:
illinguate
from 'illiterate' and 'linguistics'.
strongbad_email.exe
paintball
Surprisinly some of the better systems to "0wn" are linux hosts. So why don't these "l33t h4>0r5" crack a government box or something better than a Microsoft common vulnerability. Cause it is too hard for them.
The problem is that most users don't know what the admin authentication dialog really means, and they get asked to do it all the time by poorly-designed apps and installers. It becomes second-nature, and it won't stop a trojan from spreading, though it will slow it down a little.
Funny, I was just thinking today about all those people complaining about Apple's 1-button mouse usually are the same ones that use the 102-button mouse on a daily basis. They'll never be happy with less.
To fall for the "I have encrypted this super-secret document with the password that I have sent with this document." trick.
It's like putting your valuables on a safe with a note on the front saying "The combination to this safe is...."
paintball
You're new here, aren't you?
1) Vulnerabilities are bred by stupid people.
2) Software must have good usability for stupid people to use it
ergo
3) Usability breeds vulnerabilites.
paintball
You've beaten the hornets, too.
This is why Slashdot and the slashdot readership is laughed at (regardless of what you say or think).
I have a computer with a fried power supply. Its usability is 0, but its security is infinite.
paintball
Anybody who knows how to run something as root (and how to do it) would know how to look at the script and decide what it's doing.
Try reading the parent's post carefully next time.
Show: command not found
#linux>What the heck does that mean?
What: command not found
GUI's are for people who can't play Zork.
Sounds like I'm talking about the US, but I'm talking OS UI design. Even if you have a "secure by design" OS, with quality implementation practices and design patterns, the end-run is, the user is not going to be allowed to do whatever they please to a secured os. If you have access to run untrusted/approved code on the box, you cannot be secure. Prove me wrong. You can get close, but there will be always be a local memory map hole of some sort.
As long as you are allowing the "power user" to have the unfettered access to modify the system, its a pipe dream to think you can prevent bad code from running. Even on Mac OS X, the "administrator rights" dialog is simply a nuisance, to be dismissed with the login/pwd. Users are trained to enter it, because it occurs so much. It should be SO difficult to run code at elevated privileges, then just maybe application developers wouldn't annoy their users with the authorization. Almost nothing folks run needs elevated privileges, unless your a true uber geek.
I think most here would agree with the following: if you have local hardware access, there is no software/hardware security past the lock on the door.
But with careful UI design, and good enterprise software distribution, you can get pretty close to a secure OS, that still lets you get the job done. I don't know how you teach Joe Home User not to run a Trojan, aside from flashing horrible warnings that he's likely to be running one now... (unsigned/modified after signing code, etc.) But as we've witnessed, hardly any developers mess with the Microsoft Signing, unless its a driver that shipped with windows :| Perhaps the FSF or a major linux binary distro could start a code signing initiative. There is nothing wrong with compiled code for the masses... (don't make me slap you!)
You have to pound the crap out of any middleware that is allowed to run remote code.. like ActiveX and JavaScript. Your system policies can prevent unsigned ActiveX from running - JavaScript on the browser can get too deep into the bowels of the OS, and if that OS isn't secure by design... well don't run untrusted JavaScript either. System policies can handle this too. Unsigned MS Office Macro's are rediculous to ever allow to run. The same goes with any code block before it's allowed to execute in an email message. Throw up a stern warning.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
s/Us/Li/
paintball
A: No. For more details, visit www.apple.com
Any study which claims kids don't have a significant computer learning advantage relative to adults is highly suspect. Conventional wisdom: if your computer doesn't work, call the neighborhood 8-year-old.
Super user is a single account that can do everything. (By default, super user is named "root" on *nix and administrator for the NT branch of Windows.) When it goes away, breaking in and causing system-wide changes will be much more difficult by default.
In the meantime, Linux (not having making it easy to install this garbage) is becomming harder to penetrate since the main way to get things running is to force it on to the system or to actually behave and to get it running because the program is actually useful. By the time that Linux is super popular, the benifit of decades of hardening that Unix systems have supported will be even stronger, not weaker.
Under Windows, most of the freeware+spyware apps for Windows are there since Windows doesn't provide a feature.
Linux -- with KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla/Firefox -- often provide most of these creature comforts and it can be argued that there may be too many features (thus the Gnome simplification changes -- if you agree with them or not).
If a need arises for a minor utility, chances are it will be incorporated into KDE/Gnome/Mozilla/Firefox/... elimitating the teaser app that carries the spyware along with it.
If a version of spyware becomes sucessful under Linux, chances are this will annoy enough people that they will change the design of the software (KDE/Gnome/Mozilla...) so that -- like pop-ups in browsers now -- the spyware will become largely ineffective and sterile.
There are no commercial interests to ensure that this type of dammage is ignored. It will be routed around and not just for one specific annoying piece of spyware either; for everything in that class.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
On a *nix system, it can be just amazing.
Some people can do about 14 different computer operations in the time it takes most users to grope around for the mouse.
People don't use secure systems because they are
inconvenient. By making them more usable, it
becomes feasible to enforce their use, hence
improving effective security.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I think there are two different cases. There are features that are intrinsically insecure. Imagine, for instance, if a sexy sythesized female voice whispers everything you type, what could be considered very user friendly ;-). Now type your login. That's insecure. In general those intrinsically insecure features have to do with connecting your computer with a network (or, in the previous case, "connecting" it with the room you are). User friendliness here means vulnerability.
In very sharp contrast, there are things that could be turned user friendly to the extreme. For example, I would have loved go through XFree configuration without have ever learned about "modelines". Just a single line on the config file: "I have 1 video card and 1 monitor." In this second case, vulnerabilities are in direct relation to the quality of programming and so it can be different for different systems. Here, user friendliness means bigger code and bigger databases (user friendliness usually means treating a lot of different cases to make the relation to the computer seem more natural). In a networked case, it's very interesting to click on a link to a net radio and have your favourite music player automatically loaded, and if this code is "perfect" (that is, reasonably well coded), this would never be a security vulnerability. This feature, however, does mean a lot of plugin programming, handling of mime types, identifying valid data, etc.
Since programming in Linux is far more cooperative than in closed source software, it turns to be a simple matter of figuring out what is intrinsically insecure to implement and what is safe (and to what degree). It should never be a matter to the user to become aware of security issues in his computer until he has some confidential data to hide. For example, mail software could never execute code. Maybe the user never wanted it to. It would be as easy if there were a big fat button written "You have received a program. Click here to execute it".
Henrique Dante de Almeida
Below is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Windows was originally designed as a single-user, game-playing operating system. It had no concept of networking or segmented user space or file permissions, etc. These things, among others, were added on later as the need arose.
Windows was originally marketed to home users who wanted to play games and small businesses who wanted to track a few dozen or perhaps a few hundred accounts/clients.
Today, MS has positioned Windows as an Enterprise class OS. People who grew up playing games on Windows should know that this doesn't make sense.
I used to laugh when looking for patches for an NT4 domain that I administered a few years ago. I'd skip all of the new video (DirectX) enhancements that were constantly avaiable. What did gaming/video drivers have to do with domain controllers?
In short, you can't make something into something it's not... at least not without many problems. MS Windows is a classic example of this.
- It gives me a job that I get paid for
- More importantly, as long as the lusers keep getting the viruses, the people that write them will feel no need to make them more advanced, and thus the people that do know what they are doing are less likely to be suprised by an unknow virus. Make sense?
maybe kinda selfish... but it works.My point is that for most older, and many young users, PC security is no more than is built-in by the programmers. Programs need to install themselves, and security updates need to be completely transparent after a mouse click. Popular programs like McAfee are only secure if they make themselves secure.
I love that one. I invented something close once : "Linux can be repaired. Windows can only be broken".
That security is inversely proportional to usability; increase one and the other suffers. It makes sense to a point; as the most secure systems are (usually) the most simple ones; but that usually means no net; no HDD; etc; and more of an emphasis on Physical security. Once you start connect machines to other machines (increasing usability) you inherently decrease security. Just some thoughts
K Man
The fundamental challenge is resolved by clear requirements and good design. To make things more user friendly (or are you trying to say dumb-user-friendly?), there simply needs to be easier ways to do things. I remember my first linux install took 3 days and multiple attempts. With Suse 8.2, it took all of a couple of hours (most of that watching a movie in the other room). Tools like YAST provide a user-friendly means to accomplishing what scripting did several years ago. Unix/Linux have some more stable security features by design of their architectures - and that allows them to be more secure by default. Second to that, the education process still (as always) needs to continue.
Instead of the continuous barrage of "software failures" we all read about, I think we need to consider that there are successful ventures out there. Good software does exist and should be touted around more often to educate others. Or is every techy person a pessimist by nature and it's pure dumb luck that we accomplish things like sending people to the moon or rovers to mars?
One more thing - regardless of how "idiot-proof" things are made, there will always be a bigger idiot right around the corner.
This argument is nothing more than the same old and discredited "Security-through-Obscurity" argument wrapped (bizarrely) in the flag of Usability. Talk about Orwellian! We must keep it hard to use (and prone to errors even among system admins) in order to keep it secure!? Next: we need to destroy the village to save it; kill the villagers to save them!
The problem isn't that windows is too secure. The problem you're describing is that Windows is not usable enough to make certain "advanced" (for lack of a better word) operations accessible to the users who need them. Important functions that are hard to reach == reduced usability. Reduced usability leads to errors and security flaws.
... Also, as another user pointed out to you, windows has runas. Runas is not exactly well-known. It's a hidden feature in a command line that's already hidden from the user as much as possible. Therefore, its usability has deliberately been reduced by the engineers of the Windows system, and it illustrates this point as well. I think the poster I linked to is dead on; usability leads to increased security, not reduced security.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
should be both easy to use and secure. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive though it does require more resources to accomplish both goals than it does to address only one.
For most of the eighties and early nineties, security was not nearly as big an issue for desktop systems as it has become recently. Usability was the big issue, so that got the lion's share of the resources. On the other hand, security was much more important on interconnected systems like the systems at universities and those used by DoD and large corporations. For that reason, security was emphisized for the operating systems that were built for those types of machines. Linux inherited some of this security orientation because of it's roots in UNIX.
The programmers working on Windows not only had to make the operating system easy to use, they also had to deal with techincal decisions that were driven by marketting and political concerns rather than engineering best practices. It's not surprising that Windows is less secure than other operating systems that were originally developed in more security aware environments.
Programmers working on Macintosh Operating Systems had a big advantage over Windows programmers. They were working in an environment where there was far less variation in hardware than you find in the rest of the PC world. That left more time for development of good user interfaces and secure code.
Finally, we shouldn't forget that some of Windows' reputation for being insecure comes from it's popularity. A virus writer who wants to make a big splash might concentrate on attacking Windows machines because of the larger installed base and because he or she finds more tools available for writing malware that targets Windows. It's also likely that malware authors write first for the operating system they use and are familiar with. Microsoft's stranglehold on the personal computer operating system market works against it there as well.
In today's world, good user interfaces and security are both important requirements for any software under development. With good planning and realistic estimation there is no reason that software can't be written that is robust, secure and easy to use.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Here's a link to a paper I wrote on a somewhat related topic.
Basically I argue that there is a tradeoff between security and general functionality. Technical advances do not change the basic trade off and have historically resulted in additional functionality but no additional security.
(Usability is just a sub-case of functionality in general.)
I would be curious to know what slashdot'er think of this idea.
Security does not have to suffer if you have real usability.
Usability doesn't mean dumbing things down in insecure ways. Providing root access to all users, for example, is a hack job approach to usability. It takes a fundamental design mistake of the system -- the inability to install programs or administer common things without root access -- and completely bypasses it, rather than redesigning things in a sound way to facilitate security AND usability.
Usability doesn't even mean that someone with absolutely zero clue will be able to properly administer or run a computer.
Usability just means that any normal person can learn to use it quickly, and can use it from then on without unnecessary hassle or complexity. Usability means simplicity, organization, consistency, predictability, and responsiveness.
Proper usability benefits both newcomers and experts equally, because it eliminates hassle and minimizes time investment for everyone.
Don't make a user redo 40-step process from scratch just to change their mind on one item. When a user clicks something, give them instant, consistent, clear response, not 30 seconds of hard drive chatter or an unhelpful hourglass. Don't make a user spend an hour learning some new thing every time they want to accomplish a simple task such as installing a device driver or a program. Make all programs behave and appear in standard ways.
Or, to summarize: don't make users keep jumping through painful learning hurdles at every turn. Let them learn how to do something once, and make it easy to learn with as few steps as possible. Make it consistent, standardized behavior across all programs and the entire OS so that the user's new knowledge actually empowers them to do everything painlessly from then on.
The fundamental thing preventing Linux adoption is this one key point. With Linux, you have to keep learning and doing everything all over again. Slapping a pretty GUI interface over top of that mess doesn't make it any more usable. It's still a giant hassle due to the chaos that lies underneath. You invest a ton of time to finally figure one thing out, and that doesn't enable you to do other things any more quickly. Nothing works the same across the system. Nothing is standardized. There are 400 different ways of doing the same thing, when there should in fact just be one way. Configuration of programs often means carefully supplying options to a poorly-crafted configuration script, which then forces the user to start over at the beginning of the process if they fouled up just one option. Other times it means learning an entirely new pseudo-language just to configure the program.
Different Linux GUIs try to work around the chaos underneath, but the problem is that it's already too complex and poorly architected. That's why GUI configurators for hardware or device drivers only get you 50-70% of the way there, but you still have to go hack around on a command line and recompile the kernal to deal with the other 30% of cases. There are too many special-cases and different ways of doing things under the hood for any GUI to be able to present it in a consistent, clear way.
A GUI isn't even necessary for Linux usability. All the focus on the GUI is misplaced effort. The underlying system needs to be made usable first.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Now, to the question of security. XP is a good OS, but. All the security problems makes you wonder. Is this a problem devoted to just it being whats run on 85 % of the worlds computers? Yes and no.
I think its on equal parts, of it being pushed out the door before more development could be done, and it being so popular. Also I give credit to the hundreds of thousands of idiots who download .exe files and scripts of shady website, and P2P network. If people were smarter, there would be less problems.
Now. Linux, again IMHO, and Os X. ARE more secure. This is in fact to better coding, more R&D on the coding, and by being less known.
Linux users are in general smarter than windows users. And considering Linux is Open Source; problems can be found faster than closed source software can. Seriously, would you buy a car with the Hood welded shut?
Microsoft is honestly trying to make XP more secure. And if Service Pack 2 lives up to what hype is making it. Things might get better.
I use XP for gaming, and demo-ing software. {Family Comp}. But for my Laptop I run Suse 9.
$>man woman
$>Segmentation fault (core dumped)
This reminds me of the old debates related to multi-tasking on the Amiga versus non-multitasking OSes at the time. It's really a question of whether developers take advantage of the (security) features made available to they by the host operating system. How many legacy Microsoft applications risk breakage by incorporating new security features while they're in the user feature upgrade process? The same will be true of a developer on any operating system if they just keep adding on top of obsolete/insecure code and practices.
What is going to change to make linux less secure by adding on extra gui tools?
Is the command line going to be removed? I dont think so.
Are the tools that manipulate the config files going to lack features that you can have using a text editor? I would hope not.
The only way it will make it less secure is if the gui components are programmed really badly.
And if a gui makes an application or operating system less secure. Then something very wrong is being done.
History already supplies us an answer to this question. Lindows originally shipped with a password-less default root account. Why did they do such a braindead nincompoop maneuver? Because it made the system easier to use. I know several people who think Linux is too hard to use because they have to log in.
The security of a system is inversely proportional to its convenience of use. It follows that the more convenient we make a system to use, the less secure it will be.
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that while we shouldn't deliberately make software difficult to use, it is equally wrong to cater to the lowest common denominator user. We erred when we decided that computers should be easy enough for completely untrained users to operate.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Making it easier to use doesn't directly make it less secure in my opinion. Other than software bugs (which are common in open source stuff too, let's be fair), it is possible to make Windows fairly secure from a network point of view.
The problem is that making it easier to use lowers the barrier of entry, so you have people who aren't clued up to security best practices setting up mission critical machines. THAT makes them less secure, not the interface to the same software. imo natch.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
But development at Infocom didn't end with Zork 1. The ideal was to keep the player's focus on the game and not his on his battle with the command line processor.
What about your presumtion that the 'Dad' knows what to do with a 'MOUSE'. It has been shown that the desktop mouse intuits NOTHING about its function.
JoeR
... usability is never a liability.
All else being equal, the product that is easier to use is better. I think you're confusing usability with something else.
With more people supporting and creating code fixes for Linux, security will just go up. Just like supply and demand.
I don't think linux has had a real test of its security until it is as large of a target as windows.
I've just been getting back into *ix, and linux particularly. With all the cool things you can do, and all the different disros out there, it's pretty easy to leave something nasty unbuttoned and waiting for exploiting it seems.
Not only do they prevent you from enjoying sex, but now they attack your computer as well.
And thus the evil of condoms is revealed.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
So what did we learn from this?
That a person on Slashdot can construct a hypothetical situation to support any point of view.
Hmm - looks like the first word I type does something. I should try help
/lib/help: Permission denied
#linux> help
Funny, I type "help" on my linux box and I get:
(There is more, but the lameness filter blocked it...)
So a help system that is incorrectly configured is apparently an example of the horrible usabiity of a command-line UI?
At this point, dad tries to read the manual, but it's all so much techno-gibberish that he is lost by the third page.
Nice bit of hand-waving there. "Darn, I forgot, the manuals might actually have useful information. Well, I'll just pretend that it's too geeky for poor old Dad to read through..."
Jay (=
I know the solution:
put "man bash" on a peice of tape attached to the monitor. then if the user ever asks for help you can yell at him for being such a stupid helpless baby, tell him to type what's right in front of his face and hang up on him.
basic navigation solved and then the user can blossom from there as they see fit.
"CLIs require directions to learn at least the basics, and often those directions aren't easy enough to understand for the computer illiterate."
Linux is not designed for those users (e.g. mom and dad) in mind. Such users pay for companies like Microsoft to make software which is easy and intuitive to use. Linux and Windows fill two separate niches. I do not think it is fair to say that one provides a superset of features of the other.
"CLIs have a lot of configurability that GUIs have, but not ease of learning. Even once learned, the options need to be remembered, where a GUI will put them all in front of you if done correctly, although it has a tendency to get buried in submenus (like Preferences)."
GUIs lack a lot of configurability that CLIs have. Hence, CLI-scripting languages (e.g. bash) are often used to perform complicated tasks that would otherwise be cumbersome to perform with a GUI.
On another note, if an organization (e.g. Lindows) wants to create their own distribution to appeal to users who want a more user-friendly environment, then so be it. However, the Linux community should be wary of changing their development focus to satisfy such users.
The fact that many Joe Users do not like our software is not our problem. If Joe Users do not pay for their software, why should we be inclined to make our software work for them?
Don't get me wrong. Developers should be encouraged to help out the community by developing and providing free software that is useful. However, they should not be expected to make their software so easy to use that any monkey can use it. Let companies like Microsoft do this... they are the ones who must succomb to Joe User's demands. Fortunately, free software developers are not encumbered by the same problems (e.g. deadlines, budgets, and usability aspects.)
This goes back to my point that Linux and Windows fill two separate niches. Linux is whatever you want it to be. Windows is whatever sells.
Windows is not less secure because it is "more user friendly" and linux is not more secure because it can be obtuse and seem l33t-friendly. Windows is still locked into a one-box, one-app, one-user approach to things. And until they change that - and demand some basic network savvy from their average user - windows will never be more secure.
The unices were designed for a networked environment with lots of users with varying degrees of access. Security wasn't as afterthought - it was a prerequisite. As long as they are developed properly, adding some pretty icons, some control panels, even some (shudder) wizards will not make Linux less secure.
And since your pro-MS buddies are horrified by the thought of an open-source system,"open(ing) itself up" to "Joe User", I wonder why you're even taking the argument seriously. Burn them some liveCDs (I'd start with Knoppix, SuSE live-eval and FreeSBIE) and ask them to give those systems a good, hard look.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
As a daily user of all three of the mentioned OS's (OS X, Unix/Linux, 2000/XP) I've encountered the various problems and pitfalls that each have.
Just because on OS is very usable (easy to understand, navigate, etc) does NOT make it more liable to be hacked/trojaned/virused. What makes an OS a target of the "crackers"/script kiddies is how easy it is to bypass or defeat an OS's security system. The real blackhats enjoy a good challenge while the "crackers" and script kiddies want to do as little work as possible; all they are interested in is causing chaos and havoc.
Unfortunately, there are many more "crackers" and script kiddies than there are blackhats. As a result, the OS that's easiest to penetrate will ALWAYS be the one that gets attacked the most.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
There was a recent discussion on the Fedora-Devel mailing list (it hasn't been archived yet, so I've only seen the first post) that described SELinux as a ZoneAlarm on Steroids.
/home/user/SomeVirus (PID 2332) is attempting to read /home/user/Mail/inbox.mbx. Do yuo wish to allow this?
:
I can imagine a world where, signed packages from a trusted source could be installed and they include their SELinux permission settings, and all is well so they don't bother the user. However, if a user decides to run some Joe Random Binary in their home directory (that they got from some email) - it could run in a jail, i.e. SELinux won't let it open a port, open a file, or pretty much do anything.
Now that might annoy people, but it could work with dbus so that, once SELinux decides this app doesn't have permission to say, Open a file, it could suspend the process, and send a message out via dbus to the desktop environment, which then prompts the user with something like this:
"Program
WARNING: This is an untrusted program and could compromise your systems security! Click _here_ to configure permissions for this program.
[x] Remember this answer.
(buttons) [Yes ] [ No ] [Terminate this Program]
"
If the user clicks yes, then the program is allowed to proceed with the action. Otherwise it can be given permission denied, or the system can terminate the process.
The "click here" part to configure permissions, could be a simplified permissions console that has stuff like
[ ] This program can read files in my home directory
[ ] This program can write to files in my home directory
[ ] This program can open ports for outgoing traffic on device (combobox) [eth0/ppp0]
[ ] This program can open ports for incoming traffic on device (combobox) [eth0/ppp0]
(Advanced Settings...)
The advanced settings could allow you to say "This program can bind to port 1334 and ONLY this port", etc...
iiioxx is dead right here! Listen up uninformed Linuxians!
From what I can tell, the parent to this post is the "second" post to this story. So, I'll post this here to get away from the noise of the replies to this story's first-post thread.
The above thread is (largely) an erudite, overthought, masturbatory, navel-gazing, pissing contest about CLI vs. GUI. In case you hadn't heard, that battle/debate was DECIDED in 1984. You can argue till the cows come home and are ground into hamburger, but history has already proven one the overwhelming winner regarding the term "usability."
I'm reminded of something Amborse Bierce once wrote that exposes the problem of syllogistic reasoning
For now, I'll just say that sometimes the problem with Slashdot is that there are many more than sixty diggers.
:P
My first experience with Linux was on an old HP Vectra, with a 166mHz Pentium and 48 MB RAM. I installed RedHat 8 on it, and so the GUI wouldn't runvery well. Essentially I learned how to use the OS at first through the command line. I learned some of the basic commands (mkdir, rm, mv, chmod, etc.) from a book, but I figured out a lot of it on my own. It was a bit of a shock, considering I was more used to Windows.
The command line forces you to learn more, if you're willing to learn. With the GUI, it's easier to just be lulled into a false sense of security. Of cousrse, once you get into it, you learn that in a lot of ways the command line really does have an advantage over the GUI; it uses less resources, and if you know the commands, it's quicker to get things done. The main advantage I have with the GUI is really just the ability to open multiple terminal windows.
Having said that, I don't really think it matters how userfriendly Linux ever becomes. If you want to secure it, you simply have to learn how to do so. Just about any OS can be secure with a bit of work, even Windows (though it's not as easy). The only thing that really changes is the OS's reputation; if Linux all of a sudden became so easy to use people forgot about security, it would be known as unsecure, just as we think of Windows.
In comparison to the Mac OS, Linux really is more of a server OS: just look at all of the services a typical distro comes bundled with. Mac OS (any of them, really) is a desktop OS; though it can be used as a server, it was not exactly meant for this at first. Thus, it doesn't really have as many vulnerabilities as a server would (by default, or course).
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
It's my theory that the vulnerabilities are there on Apple, but nobody cares enough about the platform to find them. Windows vulnerabilities are found so frequently because it's the most popular platform in the world. Einstein. Everything is relative. In fact, I've been finding myself saying that so much, I think I'll invent a new pop-culture Internet acronym: EIR.
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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You are overlooking the information sharing that's already happened. First, most distros come with reasonable default settings that get the job done. Second, efficient web searching and LUG lists have made it easy for just about anyone to get cluefull advice. This knowledge sharing is what free software is all about and it works for everyone.
Anyone who uses a current distribution of free software has already taken an enormous leap of increased security. They might be less secure than a shop that's looked over by someone with twenty years of experience, but they are much better off than those poor saps who put their faith in Microsoft and other vendors.
So, decreased "security" this way is a point function not a global problem. You will never see internet threatening worms from free software like you have from the Microsoft monoculture. There's too much variety and each individual that makes a new custom solution just adds that much more diversity to the net. Individuals might screw one or two things up, and no one will ever be able to stop the pros but security and data integrity can only get better than they are now.
Good practice comes from experience. Experience comes from someone making mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you are not doing anything.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not useability, it's market penetration.
How many windows 3.11 vulnerabilities do you hear about today? None?
Does that mean that Windows 3.11 is secure? (haha).
So does it then follow that if 90% of the severs and clients on the internet were Linux... people would be complaining about how insecure linux was because people could hack it or spam it or DOS it or infect it with virii through unpatched vulnerabilities?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Not fluent.
An explanation of my choices for friends
A good example of discoverable CLI is OS/400's shell. It's both a CLI and menu/dialog driven interface. When you first login to the system, it greets you with the group of tasks that you're allowed to do. This is much like a start menu organized into task groups instead of just one big "Programs" menu.
This interface allows new user to discover the system through the menus (kind of like browsing gopher). At the same time there is a command line at the bottom of the terminal screen. When you select items from the menu you can see what commands are executed here. As you get used to the system, you can jump through the menus by typing commands directly.
If you're not sure what arguements to give to commands, you can enter only the command and it will automatically give you a dialog to fill in the needed information.
To me this was much much easier to learn than Windows. The problem with icons is that they don't describe much. It's a lot easier when you have your options spelled out on the screen.
Unfortunately OS/400's shell is not as flexible as *nix shells. That puts a limit on the fun of the interface. Now if you take some of the great design that went into OS/400 into a *nix shell... Well I'm just ranting now.
That a bunch of Windows admins would so profoundly believe that insecurity is a necessary side effect of usability is simply an indicator of just how ingrained Microsoft's fatalistic view of security is in the windows community.
The problem isn't usability, the problem is Microsoft.
There are already Linux distributions with the usability of Windows that are far more secure. The barrier to Linux acceptance on the desktop is not usability. It's more in areas like organizational inertia, ignorance of the options and the success of Microsoft's FUD campaigns.
______
My friends and roommates who I've moved to Linux haven't had any problems with Linux's usability. It's the ones who haven't been willing to try it that have had problems with being afraid of it's usability. The roomate I have now is quite happy with Linux... I tossed him into it because his windows installation self destructed, and I really wasn't willing to provide support for Windows. He tried Linux 'as a test', and hasn't looked back since.
My first roomate that I tossed into the Linux lion's den ended up with Red Hat 6.1 and Windows 95 dual-boot. He started using Linux mostly beause that's where I always left it, and it generally just wasn't worth it to boot into Windows for most things. By the time he moved out, he'd not only given up on Windows... He'd turned into one of the most avid Linux boosters I've ever known.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Did you ever notice how lame Zork games got once they started trying to add graphics? Zork Zero was pretty bad, but no where near as bad as Return to Zork.
Want some Rye? 'Course you do!
Just kill me now and get it over with!!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
If the software is easy to use, a user will not end up quitting when it "works", but is insecure..
:1)... Multiple monitor support (xinerama)... J
I want my functionality, and When I'm tired after a day of research into how to do a basic function, I just get it working, and move on.
We need a "don't delete" permission by default on Linux, and a "don't change permissions" permission, so we can protect our config and system files from accidents...
Basically I'm saying:
We have no time to worry about security because we are busy getting basic things working, and userfriendlyness and ease of use, come along with being more secure.
I'm having more problems just setting up Linux to do thing the way I want, that I don't have time to worry about security.
The software MUST get more user friendly so it can become more secure...
userfriendlyness is proportional to 1/time spent configuring and 1/time spent solving problem and 1/bugs and developer time spent studying users and number of sanely defaulted option boxes and time saving tools and 1/time saving tools that actually cost more time (like word completion implementation in Open Office (YECCH)) 1/security vulerabilties
(NPTL, foreign language support (haven't figured this out yet), multiple sounds at one time (artsd and artsdsp -m are my friends for that), desktop switching (startx --
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Macs have it down because nothing is required to install to make it secure. Mac, while it does have vulnerabilities, puts security with usability and keeps liability completely.
With Windows, you have to install 1-2 antiviruses, anti-spyware, anti-trojan, and firewall to even begin to make it secure. Then you have to ditch the default browser and e-mail programs. Then you have to ditch the default media player... you get the idea.
And no I'm not a Mac person. I don't even own one.
GUIs have multiple solutions to the same task while CLIs usually don't (aliases break this slightly, but require being a little less noob)
....
Not so sure about this one.
I find that the CLI gives you lots of options and ways to do stuff, whereas the GUI gives you only one.
OK. I can right click, or drop down a file menu, or press the DEL key, but the only way to delete files is to 'select' them and then 'delete' them
If I'm really advanced I can do a search and then delete all the files found.
Nothing like the flexibility on the command-line, with rm, find, xargs, grep --files-with-match, tar --remove-files
I agree that initially the GUI is friendlier and faster, but eventually I always end up back at the CLI for power, flexibility and repeatability.
GUI's are very good at letting you do stuff that others anticipated you might like to do, which is both it's power and it's limitation.
Directly from Google Zeitgeist:
==
Operating Systems Used to Access Google
February 2004
Windows 98 23%
Windows XP 46%
Windows 2000 18%
Windows NT 3%
Mac 4%
Windows 95 1%
Linux 1%
Other 4%
==
That's Windows 91% vs Mac 4%
I'm not saying Mac's are more or less secure then Windows, because I have touched a Mac in 12 years.
I am saying that
"Security experts say this state of affairs primarily reflects the Mac's very small share of the personal computer market, which makes it an unattractive target for virus writers looking to spread mayhem."
is hardly a lazy analysis. When there are 22.75 Windows Boxen for every Mac, you can assume that:
Virtually all hackers are familiar with Windows.
As a Windows guy, I haven't had to touch a Mac for years.
That's not the case with Macintosh guys.
A Windows attack would reach 22.75 times the audience as a Macintosh attack.
Further more, Macintosh and Linux users are experienced enough with computers to know what an Operating System is.
These people are experienced enough to download patches, and not open all attachments.
I meet people who don't know what version of Windows they are running. These people cheerfully sign up for Gator(Grrrrrr....), double click attachments, and haven't updated virus definitions since the day they got their computer.
Again, I'm not saying that Windows is more secure, I am saying that it's ubiquity has made it the target to attack.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.
If there is a vulnerability in a closed source OS, chances are there is going to be a virus or exploit written before there is a fix, but in an open source OS, vulnerabilities are discovered much easier by anyone looking for them, but the people finding them, possibly even would be virus writers, write a fix for the problem, and the software maintainers will actually add your fix into the code. It seems virus writers (with the exception of spammers) just want to show off thier technical prowess, and if its open source, they have an alternative to writing a virus. Surely though, if average Joe User starts using linux, he will run as root and download everything mailed to him, which will cause problems for him. Experienced users will have no problems most likely, just because they dont do stupid stuff like that. I haven't gotten a windows virus in about 7 years.. its not that hard to avoid if you know what you're doing.
And with the gui there is immediate visual feedback as to the effect of your action. You can see if the file was moved or duplicated.
The visual feedback is one of the most important parts of a GUI
It is true that that script wouldn't do much without root privileges... but a slight change and it could be quite devestating.
/
Simply rm -rf ~ instead of rm -rf
Sure, it doesn't wipe the whole computer. It will still boot up, you can still even log in. But everything will be gone. Documents, songs, even your Dock will be reset back to the default.
Also, if the user was an Admin user (The default account is an Admin), you could change it to sudo rm -rf / and it would prompt them for their password. Not the root password but THEIR password... and then happpily delete the entire hard drive.
It wouldn't be hard to include instructions on how to run this... in fact you could even get them to type the entire script in using pico (most people would get too confused using vi from instructions in an email) themselves and then run it thus avoiding the need to have an attachment. (How many users have you told never to open attachments because they could be viruses ? None ? Well why do they all think that ?)
Social engineering is not hard when the victim is not a power user.
Mac OS X is more secure in general, but a more powerful system has more things you can do with it and therefore more ways you can screw it up.
For some users, education is the answer. For others, restricted privileges and a competent Sys admin is the answer.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
You see this in Humans too, but at that time it was called The Black Plague. And just as we download patches from Microsoft to cure us of computer virusses, doctors help us overcome our "real-time" virusses.
I think often times people make the mistake of considering open source "better" because of the quality when it is really just this law at work. Feel free to flame.
(P.S. perhaps someone who knows a bit about biology can provide some background info, because I know didley squat about biology)
You don't need to see my
But that's completely ignoring the original question. No, being easier to use will NOT result in Linux being open to more attacks. As long as the current security procedures are left in place. As long as the user has his/her own area and does not have root authority by default, the secureness of Linux will continue. Things will only go wrong if Linux programmers all suddenly lose their minds and start coding in a redmond stylee! Easy doesn't have to mean stupid.
I should introduce you to a guy I know who can't use the start menu at all and thinks that excel is what you use to write essays.
GUI is easy to use if you don't know what you want to do. CLI is easy to use if you know exactly what you want to do. And then there are the million grey areas in between, and the people who just can't use either for anything.
The point is people need to learn about security and practice what they've learned.
/home/~ where the user has all important data in there and having no backups.
Losing / is obviously devastating, but so is losing just
Usability to non-technical people usually mean more convenience like no login and no typing passwords to install programs. The thinking is why bother with inconveniences to protect against some small odds. Sometimes they don't even think about consequences because they think a computer is another appliance. If you bought a new fridge, would you expect to maintain it regularly and to jump through hoops to use it?
I'll repeat the mantra "security is a process." This process is adding on top of usability. Without learning and practicing security, it doesn't matter which OS a user use.
Just because a user knows about root and switching from it doesn't mean the user can read scripts.
I know this is redundant nitpicking, but I just want to point out a flaw in what you're saying: You say that 4k isn't enough, except for some GIFs, but that the GIF format has much worse compression than some other formats, and that therefore 4k isn't enough in any format.
Try JPEG-compressing a small-ish photo (640x480 or so) to 4k. It'll look like crap, but it'll probably look a lot better than the same image scaled down to be compressible to a 4k GIF and then scaled back up again.
This signature is not in the public domain.
Interestingly, Jef Raskin -- the inventor of the GUI [ask anybody at PARC] and creator of the Macintosh -- went on [after the jealous Jobs smoked him out of Apple] to create the Canon Cat, which was wholly text based and keyboard operated.
Raskin considered it the pinnacle of interface design and the most usable computer ever. Sad that Canon never understood what it had but marketed the Cat as an elaborate typewriter.
Google finds plenty. Wish I had one of them Cats to fool around with...
GUI: Grandma sits down by the keyboard, looks at the screen, and presses some keys. Grandson says: "use the mouse". Grandma says "The WHAT?" Grandson points to mouse. Grandma turns it left and right. Grandson says says "move the mouse to the start button, and press the left mouse button". Grandma lifts the mouse and start looking at the keyboard for the start button.
Grandson gives up.
At least everyone born after 1900 knows how to use a type writer, and thus can figure out a keyboard. Then we only need to explain the commands, which is easier than explaining what those crazy icons.
Come'on, even Microsoft gave up on "a picture is better than a thousand words", and added subtitles to the icons. It seems that one or two words is better than the picture itself.
Because Windows is the OS that couldn't seperate the two concepts.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Windows was originally designed as a single-user, game-playing operating system. It had no concept of networking or segmented user space or file permissions, etc. These things, among others, were added on later as the need arose.
MS-DOS file permissions
Wouldn't a much improved k-desktop or knome environment do the job? Usability should be about improving the users experience by making applications available and accessable to all - it should not be about providing root access! Idealy, the user should not ever need to worry about access rights, or needing root access! A bad example of this is win XP Professional (as used in offices) - it provides the correct level of access to its normal users while retaining full access for admins - despite the fact that its based on windows OS it provides far more security, and an improved level of usability not seen in previous versions of NT, this is a perfect example of how security can be maintained, while usability in improved.
"Always know what you say, but don't always say what you know"
obeythefist writes:
How many listening ports do Windows workstations ship with by default? 4 - 6
How many listening ports do MacOS X workstations ship with by default? 0
What percentage of recent Windows worms spread by attacking default listening services on these ports? 100%
You cannot attack a service that isn't listening. "Secure by Default" is how OpenBSD can claim "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years!" with a straight face -- by not blindly leaving ports and services open in the default installed system.
OpenBSD does get attacked, mostly because it has a reputation as a hardened target (and because some people just cannot stand Theo). OpenBSD has that reputation not because there aren't 300 million installed hosts (like Microsoft claims), but rather because the primary focus of development is security. To quote the first page of OpenBSD.org "Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography.".
Meanwhile Apple doesn't make the same claims (and doesn't publish their source code), but does take a similar approach to remotely accessible services, and the result is one (rather silly, DHCP client) remote exploit in Jaguar/Panther.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
The relative vulnerability of a system, silicon or otherwise, is exactly equal to the incentive and motivation to compromise it.
The only part that usability might play in increasing a system's vulnerability is an indirect one: improved usability increases a system's popularity and value, and thus the incentive to unfairly exploit it.
Case in point: the bigger the ISP, the bigger the bulls-eye painted on it for spammers' dictionary attacks.
$linux>help
My first experience with CLI was TADS games. Once I got stuck in DOS and tried this. It didn't work. I spent 20min and finally worked out to type `win' for windows.
About 4 yrs ago I installed Mandrake. It didn't work, I got a command line. I tried help. That got me enough to reboot.
Similarly, I worked out to add '--help' by the third attempt.
Working out how to do something, compare windows / Mac help (which now requires net access!) to apropos(1).
[I am 18. I grew up on Macs, then Win9x. I have used Linux exclusively for three years.]
4 out of 5 topic pictures for this story are less than 4000 bytes.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
The original poster writes, "Macs seem to have this area down pretty well, with little in the way of vulnerabilities."
That's because the exposure of Macs is sooooo limited, no one bothers to exploit its many vulnerabilities. Zeitgeist doesn't lie.
The best defense Apple has in the way of security is not giving any application run by a user permission to change ANYTHING other than minor configuration options without authenticating each application individually.
/Applications folder and /Applications/Utilities folder and to all the apps/files under those. In those folders are applications (take a look) that are critical to the use, maintenance, and configuration of the system. No authentication or authorization is required for the primary/admin user to write to that folder. It is obvious that this leaves a path open for a virus/trojan/worm/whatever to compromise the system.
This is true for all most all Unix I have ever seen. However, the primary user on Mac OS X is the admin user and logs in as that user most of the time (often ALL of the time). The admin user in Mac OS X has full write permissions to the
-DU-...etc...
"Don't sweat the technique."
If the browser and media player are "part of the OS", which was a decision from Bill, not engineers, then a flaw in them is by definition a flaw in the OS (they run as "root").
The second flaw (which they are slowly fixing) is "open unless closed". Nmap a fresh XP install. I almost shrieked and fainted. In this way, windows is far more open - to attacks. UPNP? A dozen other "services" I could not shut off or close (where is lsof -i? And what would break if I shut some of these ports at the source?).
Lindows runs as root (shame on them), but they don't have the second flaw. Someone running evolution isn't going to be able to cause the same problems as someone running outlook. The fine-grained modularity limits what any attachment can do.
For that matter, Mac OS X has been around for quite a while, but features even better ease of use, while keeping all the security design decisions of the typical linux/unix/bsd (Safari and Quicktime are add-ons; ports are closed unless explicitly opened). Where are all the viri and worms?
In fact, good GUI and good security share the same idea - good fundamental design. MS eye-candy (fading menus? Why?) is as badly flawed as their security (MacOSX-window fades showing dock position).
I believe this project demonstrates just how easy a GUI is to learn./ www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm
http://www.niitholeinthewall.com/
http:/
Maybe now I can play all of my Linux games on Windows.
Actually, I was going to bring up the mouse, but had to post quick - boss walked in looking for a status :)
The mouse is the single hardest piece to learn for a new user, but the user gets feedback from it in the same way the monitor gives you feedback when you type. The button is actually the tricky part, because users have a tendency to move the mouse when they click the button and that can be frustrating, and there isn't always feedback when you click it. Mouse usage takes about an hour of training, but it is self learned and generally remembered in subsequent attempts, which facilitates users. Keyboard commands are memorized and often forgotten and need to be relearned. I've re-trained myself on lslpp (AIX) for what has to be the 10th time just yesterday, because I only use the program once ever 6 months or so.
The adding of words under icons reinforces the idea of what the icon does. Studies have shown that the eye focuses only on the words, but I personally think that the eye processes the picture without much thought. Eventually, an association is made, and the item is quickly locatable. Try this with randomly sorted text objects - I'm pretty sure that I could find IE or mozilla faster looking for their icons than I could from a random list of words, since I'm familiar with the icon. The same wouldn't go for Spybot Search and Destroy, since I'm not familiar with the icon yet. On the same note, an icon alone won't train the user to what the program is unless they try it multiple times.
Just do the ole Right Click on CyberLink Power DVD and rename to Power DVD or something you will remember. Same for your other programs/games, the rename is a very powerful tool for helping you to get organized. Can be done via a CLI cmd window also, but you have to drill down the appropriate level first, same as with nix. But the point of not knowing the program name is very valid.
Hi. I am a System Engineer student from Argentina. I have been using Linux for 5 years. I used Slackware, Mandrake, RedHat and Debian; among others. I also used Windows from 3.1 to XP. I am not agree with Windows Administrators that "a friendly linux distribution is more unsecure". I think that a friendly Linux distribution is harder to set up properly (that is what i experienced). The goal with Linux is that there is only one version of the kernel, generally, and you can find easily! tons of documentation about it. If you have a doubt you connect to the Internet and download a howto, a man or an info page. Thats the main problem of Windows. As we know, Windows tries to get secure by hiding stuff. It is a security by darkness method. That is why if you computer hangs up; you lose! In my opinion, that is a reason why Linux is a programmers like operation system: you can control every single aspect of your system (from memory to your desktop wallpaper); and everything is clear. You don't have to be God to guess how can you restore your machine after a hang. Of course, Windows is a payed operating system and Linux is an Open Source one. Each one has its benefits. In summary, I love Linux; and I think and I've experienced that a Linux system is by far better than Linux. Unless you are Mrs White that the only thing she does of her life is cooking. I expect not to be unpolite. If i was i apologise.
How about if you take command-completion and apropos a level further, and pop up a menu for each successive logical item?
#cd Menu: burn | eject | play | mount |directory
I like it; it doesn't have to get in the way of an expert user, but it's a simple enough approach that a beginner could catch on quickly and always have some kind of help available.
What about a key like "F1" giving you a split-screen view of the manpage for the current command? Perhaps if you're in the middle of selecting an option, it can move you to the relevant part of the man page? Or if you're within X, you get a separate help window that updates for each F1 keypress and optionally keeps a history?
Brainstorming is fun.
I don't think you can corelate usability and vulnarability. These are parallel issues for any software. In the case of Microsoft since it has a high share of the market place more virusus and other security breaking programs are written for it. If linux becomes more popular you are sure to see an increase in the numbers of viruses written for it. By your theory you don't want Linux to become popular because of the fear of vulnarability. One way not to make if ubiquitous is to makeit less usable for common desktop users. In my opinion Linux should be made more usable for my grandmother or a 3 yrs old to use, simultaneously makeing it more secure.
including the GUI.
that show what's necessary--and the default Windoze install.
Cringely touched on a related subject when XP was being prep'd.
Note: The very top of that page (Google cache--some key stuff highlighted) is trashed by Moz 1.4,
but the link at the top is the original page.
gewg_
Usability seeks to minimize the learning curve and optimize the speed of user-driven tasks. It relies quite heavily on abstraction. Security, in this context should aim to ensure that the level of abstraction does not create loss of information that can lead to an ill-informed decision.
.doc extension it will render his file useless since he can't double click and open it anymore. MS Word won't show up the file by default in the "open file" dialog box either, since it only shows known document files by default. All this adds to the confusion and increases the level of knowledge required about the system, to work around the problem. We take it for granted but a beginner has to know about file extensions, file/program associations and file types, then use these "elementary" concepts to open the file in the file dialog by choosing "display all files" from the "file type" list (even then the file will be missing his familiar word document icon) OR by renaming the file by adding a . (using the knowledge of file extensions), adding a "doc" extension (using knowledge of extensions and file associations). All this is over-whelming for the new user. Security folks don't think this way!
.doc extension can still be displayed (only greyed out). Hitting F2 highlights only the filename (the extension is still greyed out and unselected) so the user can type in a file name and the .doc extension remains intact (beyond the scope of the cursor). The user would have to hit the right arrow key to skip past the dot or hit delete button a few times to assign a new extension. In either case, when the scope of the cursor extends beyond the dot or touches upon the file extension, a warning could be displayed as a dialog box. The dialog box could have the option of "do not display warning in future". Additionally the warning dialog box could have the requirement that at least 3 instances of it must be displayed before the "do not display in warning in future" option is enabled (this is to handle accidental dismissals or users acting in a hurry (and for that it could require the user hit TAB -> ENTER or explictly click OK to dismiss rather than just enter)). Furthermore, the status bar could still always display the warning so it's less intrusive, but instructive none-the-less.
.doc file and it opened up in MS word). A file called report.doc.exe will arouse some suspiscion since it is not the norm they will get accustomed to. Further more, once they are bitten by that file, they will be more careful and their knowledge will have gone up. (using only icons cannot overcome the problem since exe files can have the same icon as a .doc document).
It is a design issue. The problem is that people who work on usability are not proficient in security and vice versa and for the two things to co-exists in harmony, requires extensive planning and effort on part of both security and usability teams.
For example, consider file extensions not being displayed by default in windows and being replaced by familiar icons. Not displaying file extensions by default allows for easier renaming. If the "stupid" user renames the file and forgets to add a
Going back to my orignal argument. It is a design issue. We are accustomed to and inclined to think in terms of windows GUI and moulding existing systems for security. If these systems were designed from the ground up with security in mind a solution to the problem is certainly achievable.
In the case of my example, the
Does enabling file extensions improve security? Not immediately, but if the users were always accustomed to file extensions the concept of file extensions/program-association would be implicitly relayed to them (by cognitive association -- every time the user clicked a
I do agree, however, that security requires the user to be more knowledgeable and usability assumes "stupid" users, but like in the example above. The two conce
-- Binary Finary
I disagree, most normal processes do not use root, email, web-browsing, MS office, the things many people do should not delve that deep into the system. Some things will and those are things that need a sanity check or a roadblock that can be easily bypassed. Similar to the warning labels on just about everything, you can use your hairdryer in the shower, however we just told you it might not be such a good idea. That kind of Are you sure? is enough to slow down many users. Combine that with limited, none Administrator/Root accounts and most lusers can't break nearly as much shit as they would with free-reign. There's a reason that your TV has all the screws on the back and the big scary warning label. The Sandbox, restricted user is the best way to keep your 10-year old from trashing the system; secretaries aren't any different.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Im all for linux being more user friendly, but i still cant stand seeing people treat it like windows. I love the fact that you can operate the whole operating system from the command line, but people who are migrating from windows, often dont and wont appreciate this. alice@ozforces.com
alice@ozforces.com