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NSA Advises Upgrade To Windows 7
An anonymous reader writes "In a document available from the NSA (warning, PDF file), that organisation advises users to upgrade to Windows 7 as part of their Best Practice for Securing a Home Network. No mention of BSD or Linux so I guess the Slashdot crowd will just have to bite the bullet and change operating systems if they want to be really secure."
this means that there's an even better backdoor for the NSA in Win7?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
way to be a teenage provocative troll
This is talking to your average home user, and guess what, Linux is not exactly a popular desktop OS. It certainly has it's draw, but switching over to it just is a non-starter for most people. You'll also note they talked about Mac OS upgrades too, not just windows 7. Windows 7 upgrade was mentioned specifically if they were already using a windows OS.
The article suggests that, if your are running Windows, that you upgrade to Windows 7 or Vista.
It also has advice for MAC users.
Just because it has no advice for Linux or BSD users doesn't mean that the article suggests that Linux or BSD users should switch to Windows.
[But you all knew that -- whenever are /. summaries accurate?]
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Not the 1% who use LINUX desktops. Spare me the trolling. I like Ubuntu a lot, but I'm a tech person. Most people aren't, get over it.
The NSA have an excellent guide for securing Linux systems (particularly Redhat, but much is applicable to all distros), so they're hardly Windows-centric.
how did the NSA recommending that WINDOWS USERS upgrade to the latest version of WINDOWS. turn into a linux story?
portfolio
Windows 7 IS a worthy upgrade from XP - certainly from the security point of view. I have helped people with transitions from XP/Vista to 7 and found an almost unanimous praise for it. Given the choice, people preferred 7 for reasons of aesthetics, functionality and robustness.
The longer the Linux crowd believes that Microsoft can not make decent quality (once in a while at least), the longer they'll fail to make any changes which might someday resolve the issues that push people away from Linux.
No, the NSA recommends that you use a "modern OS" and then gives Windows Vista and Windows 7 as examples. Nothing suggests they consider these the only modern OS's in existence.
Remote desktop and remote registry aren't on by default in Windows 7.
This makes the rest of your points invalid.
It would be unreasonable to expect Grandma & grandpa who barely know how to turn on a computer to learn Linux...
"For securing a home network" = Basic computer skills, not the linux lovers (unless linux becomes more wide spread and taught to people)... so Compared to Windows 2000/Vista/etc.. recommending people use 7 for Home Networks (as in, those not in the slashdot community) is a perfectly reasonable suggestion
t would be unreasonable to expect Grandma & grandpa who barely know how to turn on a computer to learn Linux...
This is on oft repeated fallacy. And it is a fallacy. There is nothing harder for 'grandma and grandpa' about Linux vs. Windows. Especially if they don't already know Windows. My computer-literate, non-programmer friends who want technical support from me use Linux, and I hardly ever get a call.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I guess no one involved in green lighting this read the PDF.
The NSA pamphlet was only for Windows and Mac users, it didn't mention migrating to LINUX or BSD because it wasn't about alternative OSes, just what current users should go to.
They have a bunch of these fact sheets, shocking the securing iPhones and iPads one doesn't talk about migrating to Android or Win 7.
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/fact_sheets.shtml
For a competent technician either OS can be installed and configured properly. Perhaps in their case they could pay one with the savings on the Windows 7 licence fee.
Does this include cases where "properly" means "correctly running the Windows-only applications for which I bought the computer in the first place?" I didn't think so.
I don't think "old stuff works" is going to be much of a selling point.
For Enterprise work? Sure it is. Nobody wants to throw out thousands of perfectly good printers just because you upgraded the OS. Well, except for printer manufacturers that it is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
t would be unreasonable to expect Grandma & grandpa who barely know how to turn on a computer to learn Linux...
This is on oft repeated fallacy. And it is a fallacy. There is nothing harder for 'grandma and grandpa' about Linux vs. Windows. Especially if they don't already know Windows. My computer-literate, non-programmer friends who want technical support from me use Linux, and I hardly ever get a call.
My elderly parents (> 70 years old) have been running Linux for about 5 years. They don't know or care what the underlying operating system - all they want is a web browser so they can send mail and browse the web. I gave them some desktop shortcuts for some common websites and set their browser homepage to to a page on my webserver so I can give them additional shortcuts (like a link to my sister's Picasa page) anytime I want. I moved them to Linux after multiple viral infections (despite anti-virus "protection") made their computer unusable under Windows. When I gave them a new laptop 2 years ago and showed them Windows, they wanted it back how it was, so I ditched WinXP and moved them back to Linux/Gnome.
Looks like they'll be staying with Gnome2 for the forseeable future since I don't want to teach them to Navigate Gnome3's new interface (or, worse, Unity).
Oh, and the printer they bought as Best Buy works fine.
You could be some kind of Linux Guru, that being said you could also know how to use google. Here's some help http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+use+Google%3F You're welcome.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
For those who contributed to the above Slashdot summary who are obviously incapable of properly navigating or searching Web sites, the NSA provides advice on securing multiple different computer operating systems and revisions. Yes, that includes Linux and even Solaris, and multiple versions to boot. Furthermore, additional research will yield that the NSA also has articles on securing a variety of common applications, Web browser plugins, and file formats. Then again, should anything less be expected from the organization that created and developed Security-Enhanced Linux in collaboration with Red Hat?
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
Dunno what to tell you; works fine for me. Sure you're not just running it on really old hardware?
To be completely fair, I do seem to be having a weird effect with the newest update, where the videos load full-screen in the background and I have to minimize the browser in order to see them. It's annoying, but not exactly a critical flaw. Other than that, flash works as well when running on my Ubuntu partition as it does when I boot into Windows 7.
This isn't "news", it's a bad blog rant.
The paper is for home users, and they are right to focus on the 99% there that are covered by windos and OS X.
And accusing the NSA of not supporting Linux is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a decade. These are the guys that brought us SELinux, including fighting on our behalf to get an assurance that there won't be patent troubles with it.
You can accuse the NSA of a lot of things, like covert surveilance and stuff, but certainly not of ignoring Linux. Heck, they even have a hardening guide for Red Hat on their list of official guides, just like they do for windos, OS X and Solaris.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is what frustrates me most. In my experience, the actual incidence of malware being installed without the user's knowing is close to zero these days. Since Vista, whenever I've heard of someone who got a virus it turned out that they were actually clearly warned that they were doing something very dangerous, sometimes even their antivirus software protested that it was a virus, and still they click continue. Why? Free movies online! Just download this video plugin first!
Users cannot be relied upon to make security decisions. The only way to make a secure OS is to remove the human factor, to take away all decision power for installing malware, which means you have to prevent them from installing anything that's not from a curated app store. In short, although it pains me to admit it, apple's model is the only one that can be truly secure.
Can you claim zero remote code vulnerability in linux, despite it being open source?
Having the source is meaningless when it consists of tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code. Back of the envelope calculations indicate that it would take you about 500 years to review 100 million lines of code, provided 8 hours a day are spent on it, every day. And then there's the bootstrapping issue. How can you be sure that the binary components you use to bootstrap the OS (be they executables or just a compiler) actually are secure?
In short, the only security metric that matters for operating systems is "do i trust my vendor?". Having the source doesn't buy you a single bit of security.
If you don't think microsoft can be trusted, I would have to ask why. Granted, in the 90's they had an awful track record, but if I look at the past decade, I see a business that "gets it" when it comes to security.
Wow, a grandmother who uses Flash CS5? (I thought they only programmed in C --- the young ones, anyway.)
Egads, couldn't you have found something a bit more logical, like her grandchildren want to play a specific Windows-only game?