Community Comments To Security Absurdity Article

An anonymous reader writes, "Earlier this year Noam Eppel's Security Absurdity article generated much debate in the Information Security community (covered on Slashdot at the time). He claimed that we are currently witnessing a 'profound failure' in security. Now the author has posted a follow-up highlighting some of the community comments prompted by the article, titled 'Feedback to Security Absurdity Article — the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.'"

Comments

Don't wait for Micro$oft when you could be free.

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A beautiful pair of articles but they fall apart when considering Vista.

I, for one, applaud Microsoft's recent efforts and results. I predict that Vista will have quite a positive effect on the overall state of computer security and we may see a Vista Ripple Effect throughout the industry. However, technology alone will not solve the security challenges and how well Microsoft has implemented the security features in Vista is still yet to be determined.

It's amazing that he can do such a great job of documenting failure but then recommend vaporware from a disreputable company over proven and easy to use solutions.

Today we REQUIRE that individuals that just want to do their jobs, communicate with colleagues or play games online (i.e., normal and common behavior) have to become advanced computer users in order to do so.

Bull! Free software and Mac both offer easy fixes that are available today. My life is much easier because of the way free software deals with the problems he mentions. Kmail displays all of my mail in plain text but an html rendering is only a button click away. There's not much I can do about all of spam my neighbors send me, but I know I'm not sending it and what little gets through my ISP and then my own filters is not going to make a bot out of my machine. Oh yeah, whitelist filters in my mail client make sure that mail I care about gets put where it belongs. I'm not going to delete a letter from my mom while cleaning out the inbox because my client puts the mail in a folder labled "mom" leaving the spam behind. For those that complain that installing and using free software is too hard because there's not enough vendor support (thanks to M$!), I recommend a Mac. Apple has brought a lot of the technical achievements from the free software world to the public. It's a shame they don't also give them their freedom, and that does reduce Apple's ability to keep ahead of the bad guys, but the platform is usable and safe for "normal" use by non experts. At less than $600, the mini is also affordable. That and or the big $0.24 it costs to burn a Mepis CD are all it takes to escape the Windoze dissaster.

Why is it that he overlooks these two excellent options and praises an OS that's still as buggy as all hell from a company with a history of empty security prommisses amped by billions in advertisement spending?