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Open Letter to a Digital World
jg21 writes "Exasperated after spending 5 hours removing spyware and trojans from his wife's Windows PC, sysadmin Chris Spencer has written an impassioned Open Letter to a Digital World. In the letter he reviews the 'elephants in the closet' - i.e. unfixed bugs and glaring security vulnerabilities - that Microsoft in his view hopes ordinary users will ignore, including some discussed in previous Slashdot stories."
He has a CS degree, runs Linux himself and still let his wife surfing the web with IE? What went wrong? We all now that alternatives exist.
Well, this is a nice letter and all, but I have a feeling the only people with the patience to read through the whole thing are already convinced of its content...
.e. unfixed bugs and glaring security vulnerabilities - that Microsoft in his view hopes ordinary users will ignore,
The bugs he describes have already been fixed in Windows.
In other words, he's STILL using an unpatched system, and complains of unfixed bugs? Come off it. MS bashing might be a worthy cause, but this is like blaming Clinton for the war in Iraq.
Not by letting her run IE, but by letting her run IE on a Windows box as full admin.
"... despite the anti-virus, regular Windows updates, having the good sense not to open attachments, using a firewall, and avoiding any type of seedy activities online..."
Let's see, it's 2004, XP is two years old, 2K is four years old, and your wife got spyware for one of two reasons:
* You let her run too old a version of Windows (98/ME) with no built in security, (Melissa got past anti-virus software remember) or
* You let her run 2K or XP with full admin or "power user" access.
You two only have yourselves to blame for choosing to run a machine insecurely. Yes, you. You could've stopped all of this before the fact if you ran a modern version of Windows as limited users, if you used a mail program Designed for XP and kept that up to date as well as the OS, if you treated the 'net like any other public place instead of trusting everyone by default.
You chose Windows, and you chose to run it insecurely. If you think running Linux is the cure, go right ahead. But if you run it as root, you don't deserve any sympathy from me. And if you run XP as a full admin, you deserve even less sympathy.
Take charge of your own computer security already, however you do it. Don't whine at Microsoft because you let it happen.
And damn my slashdot karma to Hell anyway. I'm sick of this whining: "Microsoft (this), Microsoft (that), Microsoft (whatever)." Lazy bastards. How come MY MOTHER doesn't get spyware or viruses or whatever when she's running only XP Service Pack 1? Without any AV software? Explain that.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
He's not hoping to affect MS with stern words, he's hoping people start to switch away, which can happen when enough of the geek population think it's right (as Firefox is starting to show).
Once people in numbers start to switch away, it is possible Microsoft will react with better products (again, as an example they have restarted IE development because of Firefox), everyone wins then (even the people who haven't switched).
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Why didn't he setup a non-root account for his wife on the windows box? Why didn't he install THE browser, Firefox, on his wife computer? Why didn't he enable excessive auditing so he could track down which app installed what and when?
Oh, that's too hard? If that's too hard, you're not a sysadmin.
True, spyware can be almost viral these days, but there is one factor which enables it in the first place: the user. "Oh, this nice free tool from www.[the tool's name].com is so handy!", should ring a bell, a lot of bells, alarmbells to be exact. NO search bar comes for free, unless it's open source, to name an example.
First I thought, hmm could be a great article, but after a few paragraphs it was clear this article is not great, it's the frustration of a person who doesn't WANT to understand windows and blames the consequences of that to the OS. I mean, blaming IE and not having firefox installed should be enough to categorize this article as "ordinairy propaganda".
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I don't run anti-virus. I don't have a firewall. I don't run spyware-removals under normal circumstances. If I feel the computer is feeling odd I download and run F-Prot's free DOS version followed by running Adaware 6. On some single occasion I've run Norton Anti-virus just to be on the safe side
I'm not alone in using this computer, my not quite so computer-literate girlfriend does too. I often download shareware games and freeware programes, not to mention warez every now and then.
Despite all this - I have never (*knock on wood*) been virus-infected. I have never gotten any spyware.
So I have to ask myself, what to do all these people do to get their computers so messed up? Why isn't it happening to me, when I run the same Windows without any protection? Is it really Windows fault?
Telling all the stories you like about how your (or your mothers/wives/SO's) machine has never had a virus/spyware attack even though you never run anti-virus software nor a spyware detection suite isn't going to mnean a lot.
The simple fact is that many of the people on this board have to work with windows (from 95 to 2003) everyday and can tell you horror stories about machines that have been secured, reside behind a natting firewall, etc etc but still they get slapped down by the newest virus which has snuck in through a vulnerability which was patched three months ago.
The other area you seem to be missing is the inate ability of users to fuck things up, no matter how secure you make it. All it takes is one innocent click on a link and all of a sudden you have spyware coming out your nose.
I read a number of people who indicate one should run Windows XP in user mode, but have they actually tried it? Unless you wish to simple browse the Internet, you are pretty restricted and unlike Linux, a myriad of programs require "root access" and cannot be installed locally.
The first thing one should do before connecting Windows to the Internet is simply install a firewall, then run Windows Update, then install Firefox -- sites exclusively reserved to Internet Explorer users are becoming decreasingly common, it should not be a problem anymore.
Sorry, but all my relatives who I have switched over to Firefox or Mozilla do not have ANY spyware. Nada. Nothing. I showed them a list of spyware apps, in other words what not to install and they have healthy and happy PCs.
Claiming switching to linux is the only solution is a huge admission of ignorance of how the spyware problem stems almost exclusively from one piece of software, namely Internet Explorer.
Windows, even as admin, can be safe for the technophobe. I've seen it and I continue to see it. The problem is IE. I don't care how savvy you are, if you're using IE to access the WAN (perhaps SP2 is an exception) you will get spyware and other nasties.
So many "linux advocates" are so ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater, its absurd and makes the zealots, well, look like the zealots they truly are. Not to mention, if Linux hits critical mass on the desktop (yeah Im not holding my breath either, OSX has a much beter chance of toppling Windows) then spyware developers will target it also. Grandma will still get emails like "Funnyshit.rpm" and the browser will ask if you want to install "super-search.xpi." These apps will hide themselves anywhere they can, just like they do in windows.
Better browsers and more informed users is the solution, not advocating one's pet OS.
Yep.
/home/luser/ - > /home/locked/luser.tar.gz /home/luser/* /home/luser/README /home/luser/Desktop/ /home/luser/README /home/luser/Desktop/README.txt
In linux cleaning out spyware is very simple.
tar zcsp
rm -rf
echo "We need to talk" >
mkdir
cp
The whole ordeal taken care of, thankyou very much.
There is a advantage to having primitive and coarse permissions setup and have a history of applications that are designed since before Win95 to operate properly in a locked down enviroment.
It's all part of the legacy of Unix being a multiuser enviroment for high-end machines for critical data infrastucture and NT designed for a simple file server that was combined with a single user operating system (Win9x) to make WinXP. (and be backward compatable with Win9x)
Linux and Windows are not equal. Hackers are a problem with Linux, but malware isn't. Different OSes, different issues. Linux is difficult for many people to install, Windows is difficult for many people to operate in a safe and secure manner.
Which do you suppose is a worse trait?
No Linux viruses in 2005. Not one.
How many has Windows have? Maybe a thousand? 2 thousand variants?
Now Mozilla and Firefox will warn you and make you wait two seconds before you try to install something unsigned. IE won't even do that unless you instruct it to in the Advanced Settings and sometimes it will do it anyway, but that's what you get for the broken piece of shit they call ActiveX.
Granted, Linux is much more secure than Windows, but when you give Linux to a horribly inept AOL kind of luser, then it won't take long for him/her to get r00t3d, too if the distro leaves services running by default, like for example HedRat. At least with HedRat, you can shut down those services if you know how to do it. Meanwhile in XP, you can't shut down the RPC service without Windows going total batshit. XP won't even let you do it at all! You NEED a firewall just to sweep it under the rug. Now, if that's not a severe and utterly braindamaged flaw in OS design, then would someone tell me WTF is?!? (Aside from IE built into Windows)
And which ones are those? Seriously.
Given that the programs can register themselves by whatever name they like, this is non-trivial. Given that the names of many of the valid entries look pretty odd already, by just unchecking things you can quickly find yourself with an unusable system.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
I'm probably on thin ice saying this here, but oh well.
I run three OSs at home: OS X, Fedora Core 3, and Xp Pro. At work, I admin XP Pro and Red Hat.
My company has about 150 PCs running some form of Windows. In the last year, we've had one infection. One.
At home, I've never had any. Ever.
While I totally support GNU/Linux (including monetary donations and buying distros like SuSE at retail price), I also pay for and use XP Pro for various reasons. I agree that Windows is deficient in many ways, and I agree that Microsoft could do things differently and be better for it in the long run.
However, I find it very difficult to understand how so many people's computers get infected. Windows or not. I do nothing special at home...the only thing I've done is use a broadband router from Netgear (because I have more than one computer), make sure I keep my XP Pro machine updated, install anti-virus and keep it updated (automatic) and use Firefox.
This guy is a sys-admin, and his wife's computer gets infected? How? If it is "his wife's" computer, that implies he has multiple computers at home. This implies some sort of router...even a $20 router uses NAT and has basic firewalling built in.
Either this guy is a poor sys-admin, or his wife did something with the computer to get it infected. So, Windows and Microsoft flaws aside, what we're really talking about here is a user education issue. I, as a user, at home, am educated about security issues on my PC. The people at work are educated. I don't have problems at home, and neither do we have problems at work.
So, while his open letter is all well and good, maybe in his case he should focus on better education at home and spend the $50 required to get a decent NAT router with firewalling, instead of bleating about Windows.
Don't know how things work in your home but in my home, I have a computer (Mandrake) and my wife has a computer (XP home). I don't 'let' her do anything with her pc, she does what she damn well wants thank you very much and god help me if I start screwing with her setup and make something burp... and yes, I do have to clean up the mess when things go bad.
the good news is that her system is well patched, runs zone alarm, avg, mozilla, and I just switched her from aim to gaim. Step by step the migration to FLOSS goes forward.
Keep in mind that 'her' computer is for more than home and has to work at her place of employ (Windows and apple shop) so some of the 'hands off' has to do with not screwing up use of the system at work.
Anyway - bottom line, at home you are NOT a sys admin, you're a spouse with special skills.
dogu
And the other 20% are unplugged.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
That because we don't want to play the "blame-game" like politicians and big corporations do. We want to play the "who can do something about it game" and MS is definitely the one entity that has the means to do something about this problems.
Linux is not Windows
Instead of writing "open letters," (also known as "pompous soliloquies") maybe he could try interacting with his wife once in a while to find out what the fuck she's up to. If she's really so clueless, he should configure the computer as a kiosk suited to whatever her normal tasks are. And pad the sharp corners of the monitor and case.
I have to wonder, are the OS and apps really at fault here? I know people who've run Windows OSes for a decade without once getting spyware, virii, trojans etc. on their machines. Therefore there must be some other element at work here. If you outfitted the reetee in question's computer with, say, Mandrake, and with no more information or interaction than you provided before, do you really think that she wouldn't be able to fuck it up in short order? I'll tell you what, I'm a bit skeptical of that.
In any case, blaming the world for your wife's stupidity is not going to fix it.
You don't run and you are not behind a firewall, you don't us AV and you don't use any spyware software. You download shareware/freeware/warez.
You have NEVER gotten spyware or a virus.
I cry bullshit.
You MIGHT be able to get away with that kind of system administration with WinXP SP2. If you hang an unprotected windows box onto an external (read, outside the firewalls) 100 meg network, you will be scanned within 30 seconds to a minute and compromised within an hour. Possibly longer, if you have really tweaked the machine. That would go against your premise though, if you spent any time securing your machine, then you probably needed a firewall.
There are trojaned machines constantly scanning for machines, like yours, in the wild. Microsoft patches have been too late to stop an infection more times than I can count.
I am a sysadmin and security engineer. I could secure a box, without third party apps, so that I could surf the web, download software (AND INSTALL IT) etc. It takes time and effort that I am not willing to spend. It also assumes that there is nothing on that workstation that I don't mind sharing with the world, since I am not perfect and any machine can be hacked/cracked if you put it on the Internet.
I use winxp sp2, firefox, proxomitron, adaware, symantec AV, spybot, sygate firewall and a couple of homerolled apps. Between my wife and my kids, we still get adware/spyware, we have not had a virus in years. A large percentage of the shareware out there has some kind of spyware. Many websites get you when you register. Etc etc etc
"So I have to ask myself, what to do all these people do to get their computers so messed up? Why isn't it happening to me, when I run the same Windows without any protection? Is it really Windows fault? "
Sorry, your post just doesn't ring true for a workstation that is actually used for daily, office automation type work and play. Microsoft doesn't even try to claim that you don't need a firewall or other protection. They don't hang windows boxes on the net unprotected.
There is. Firstly, Unix has been in use in university environments for nigh on a quarter-century now. Cracking systems has been a hobby for college comp-sci majors for as long as computer systems have been available to crack, and the operating-system-design classes in that major are often based around dissecting the actual source code of the very systems they're trying to crack which means they've far more detailed knowledge of Unix systems than of Windows. And yet, despite that, Unix remains relatively secure in that environment. Why should we assume this would change?
Secondly, track record. Apache on Linux is probably the most popular platform for Web servers based on NetCraft and other surveys. Apache on Unix of some sort definitely is not only more popular than any other option, it's more popular than all other options combined. Unix is the dominant OS there (and the traits that make Linux secure are simply the normal traits of any other Unix variant). Yet while we see regular compromises of Web servers, compromises of Apache on Unix are relatively rare. If it's not compromised often in an environment where it is the dominant platform, why would it be compromised often in another environment if it were the dominant platform?
I too hate the lack of security and the number of exploits that the typical Windows machine is exposed to. I feel that Microsoft has a responsibility to do something more than they are doing to fix the problem and sadly, I don't see them doing enough in the near future at least.
But I disagree that this is what it should take for people to migrate from Windows to Linux. People should make their choice for the right reasons and only one of those reasons is security. They also have to weigh things like user-friendlyness, support, cost, effort required to learn, availability of the applications that they require and probably a dozen other user variables.
Open Source in general and Linux in particular, has been making great progress in virtually every aspect that I can imagine. In many ways it is ready for "prime time." Yet to claim everyone should move to it, I can't quite accept that yet. In my business, you can't find particular applications (relating to "industrial formulation calculators" for instance) that are necessary for the operation of the business in open source (I've researched this).
While I am able to work my way around a Linux Desktop with KDE and be fairly comfortable with it, members of my family don't seem quite as capable and frankly, I don't want to spend the time teaching them.
Still, I spend close to fifty percent of my workday dealing with spyware (and another 1 or 2 percent dealing with viruses, worms, and trojans) and I hate it. I haven't found a single product out there that does an acceptable job of preventing it or cleaning it although on my home Windows machine the McAffee suite + AdAware + Yahoo Anti-Spy seems to mount a pretty good defense. The McAfee is always on and auto-updated, I run automated anti-virus scans every night. I run AdAware every couple of days, and right now, since it is new, I am running Yahoo Anti-spy every day. My ISP also filters my email with an anti-virus program and I practice all the common preventitive measures and am quite liberal at assigning "spam" tags on incoming emails.
Still, all of this amounts to a lot of work. I do think Microsoft shares the blame with the malware authors in the same way that car manufacturers used to carry part of the blame for car thefts (since cars were so easy to steal). Microsoft it would seem to me has the same kind of responsibility that car makers had, to develop a safer product. I am willing to share part of this expense (developing products costs money and that cost is passed on to customers - it is what for-profit companies have to do). I also hope we get help from legislators and from ISP's, and even hardware companies who each in their own way can develop things that would make malware harder to propogate.
I'd also like to challenge computer makers to provide us with additional choices, like packaged Linux boxes, better secured Windows boxes, and software that actually works that comes bundled with machines so that so many people don't download "free" spyware-laden products to do something they expected their computer to do out of the box (Dell, Sonic - do you hear me?).
I hate these types of "letters". All they do is make Microsoft look bad, but they don't make Linux look very good. Most people I talk to that are frustrated with Microsoft look at linux (on the desktop) and say - OK, it's free, but it isn't as "nice" as windows.
Those same users really like OS X - but they don't want to buy an expensive computer to run it.
The reason spyware is not a problem for linux yet is two-fold:
1. Marketshare - if you are writing spyware, wouldn't you want to "spy" on the largest user base?
2. Application installation ease - most spyware does not install itself. Most spyware i've run into came from users directly downloading and double-clicking files. Installing apps on Linux is not nearly that easy - and that's why my sisters, neices and nephews don't like Linux. They can't double-click and install.
Sure, eventually Linux will HAVE to be that easy to get the marketshare that Microsoft has. Don't rattle off the excuse about being prompted for a password in OS X - i've seen users blindly type in an admin password every time the installation box pops up.
When *nix becomes easy (and popular), spyware will become a problem on *nix.
-ted
How do people get +3 Insightful for completely missing the point?
First, I don't know about anyone else, but it is an incredible pain trying to run Windows (2000, at least, in my experience) as anything but Administrator.
Second: what is this "Maybe he is just an idiot" crap? He could easily have a wife who, like anybody else, would prefer to have their computer how they want it and for others to leave it alone. I know plenty of people who get irritated if anyone changes things on their personal computers--much less use them. As for rootkits, etc., are 80% of Windows users (the people who have this problem) really going to have access to those things, the skills to use them, or even the dimmest knowledge of their existence? Of course not.
Jumping down this guy's throat over the state of his wife's computer is completely missing the point. His point is that there are millions of people just like her, and his weighing of the pros and cons makes Windows an absurd choice for a desktop OS. Address that. Stop grasping for ways to tear him down instead of his argument.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.