I suppose the joke would be that by the time you've found the right RPM, installed it, found the dependencies, installed them all, read the man page, re-read the man page, read the README, read the man page for a third time, searched Google and found the one bit of info you needed, made the symlinks and started the program, your house would be but a pile of ash or you'd have an axe in your head.
Yes, but clever usage of "grep", "lynx -dump" and a "for" loop in a quickly hacked up shell script would give we Linux geeks the extra time we need to save at least one PC and the beers from the refridgerator...
Predictable response and you're in between a rock and a hard place no matter what answer you give - after all, if you admit to it, no-one's going to take you seriously on security any more...
It's a shame I didn't keep some of the original discussions about this because your site was definitely stated as the source from where our email addresses were obtained.
but as a Windows IT guy that wants to move to linux
Why "move"? Dual boot it, play with it and move when and if you're ready to.
It's amazing that a company that hosts the richest man in the world can't cope with the innovation of an 'inferior' (I'm being facetious here, not trolling) business model.
The problem with Windows security is one of architecture, not so much business model.
When a UNIX system gets attacked, it's because some cracker or script-kiddie has picked that system as a target - because of a buggy service that can be buffer overflowed, maybe because of a weak password on an account or maybe because of a file permissions issue. However, all these vulnerabilities can be corrected by a sysadmin who knows what he's doing and applies patches, tunrs of unnecessary services and locks permissions down. Bastille is just a tool that does the vulnerability analyis for the sysadmin and makes recommendations, maybe even carries some out.
Windows, by design, has to allow certain applications full access to the system. That's why attacks on Windows systems are not usually targetted attacks but worms and viruses that can exploit a design weakness to get in and do their stuff on any Windows systems they find. So where as you know the likely points of intrusion into a UNIX system, you don't on Windows until either a worm hits it or MS release an update telling you what they've fixed.
You can't say that either UNIX or Windows is more secure than the other out of the box but a good UNIX sysadmin has much more chance of predicting and preventing attacks than a good Windows sysadmin does.
Unfortunately, you're lost on the context in which you would use Bastille.
AV packages and XP firewall are more desktop orientated security applications that usually provide a second layer of security protection after corporate firewalls, NAT routers, proxies, etc.
And whether you like it or not, there are security holes in Windows purely as a result of the architecture and the fact that a lot of applications have free access to any part of the system.
If you have similar security holes in Linux it's because you're running a service at root permissions or have some file permissions set wrongly. You might not be using a UNIX system that has strong password checking built in or you might have inactive accounts on your system. All these things the types of issues checked by Bastille.
Sure, you could use Bastille on a UNIX/Linux desktop to lock it down a bit but it's real use is for locking down services and maybe creating a server to hide desktops behind, like a NAT proxy. So it's more important in small office or home server use where a server needs to be doubly secure because you don't have the protection of two firewall layers that you will inevitably find in a corporate environment.
I don't suppose someone could port this to windows could they?
It's not really "portable" in the same sense as, say, Mozilla Firefox.
I've not used Bastille in a while but I recall it's more of a tool that makes recommendations and changes to your system to lock it down - these can be everything from file permissions, service lockdown and kernel firewall settings.
Therefore it's very much tied to the UNIX topography and even if you got it to run on Windows, the architecture is so different that it would be a totally different application by the time you'd modified it enough.
However, you might want to consider running Bastille on, say, a Linux NAT/proxy router and just tucking Windows machines behind it.
This is presumably the same johnny.ihackstuff.com who got hacked himself recently resulting in the email addresses of subscibers to his web site getting into the hands of spammers - mine included with a huge increase in spam to it as a result.
1. Then you are an exception rather than the rule. I know of no-one in my circle of friends & work colleagues who has ever bought a boxed MS operating system or product. Sure, a few of them have bought complete PCs with Windows on, but most build their own and just use copies of MS CDs.
2. I know (or care) nothing about MS EULAs but I wasn't aware that they covered home use. Sure, if you have a company laptop that you take home, that's okay but if it's your own PC then it does not fall under what your company purchased as bulk licenses from MS.
3. Agreed, but then the morons have fallen for the marketing hype about PCs being easy to use and maintain. MS and PC vendors are to blame for this so if they have complaining morons as customers, they can blame their marketing people.
4. As in point 3, it is if MS have played you for an idiot and got you to part with your money in the first place.
5. If I keep my English ale then that's fine because it means there's more of it for me!:-)
The defenders of MS Office always make me smile...
Invariably 90% of them have never paid for their copy of it believing themselves to be under the Microsoft "I use it at work so I can install it on 12 PCs at home" Licence or the Microsoft "My mate gets the MSDN CDs and he's allowed to let anyone else use them" License.
I wonder how many of the same people would be so vocal if they had to shell out £200 for a copy?
Me? I use OpenOffice and can save my pennies for 100 pints of fine English real ale while sleeping soundly and night knowing I'm not contributing to Bill and Melinda's sorrow at being unable to afford a new extension this year due to all those "naughty little Office pirates".
If you would like to share with me some specifics about the exploits you've suffered from in your usage of Linux, I will be more than happy to provide you with some advice on security techniques and server hardening if you so wish.
I look forward to you providing me with the name and version of Linux distribution you are currently using that is suffering these problems. Once I have that information, I can then give you some detailed assistance with your issues.
It's only dogma that tells you that a "text" format doesn't need support for video.
Actually, it strike me as common sense.
Firstly, how much of what Microsoft produces do you honestly believe is created because the users have demanded it? I'll tell you the answer, none of it.
Since around Office 97, Microsoft has simply been adding features & formats to Office purely to create some justification to users to go spend more money on an upgrade - most users are too innocent & trusting to know what they want and probably around 90% of them use about 10% of Office's core features.
Added to this, why in heck do we need another document format purely to embed video in it? Web developers already do that every day of their lives using HTML and embedding some Marcomedia Flash in it... talk about Microsoft re-inventing the wheel...
Instead you see a chance to push the UNIX philosophy down people's throats. This is classic flawed OSS thinking.
Actually, you're thinking is totally flawed. OSS does not equal UNIX; otherwise, please explain how come OpenOffice also runs on Windows?
You can't replace the.doc format until you understand what people use it for.
They use it because it's there. They do and use what Microsoft tells them to because they do not have any inkling about the ramifications of using a closed information format means to the distribution of information.
"why would any sane developer want to prevent someone from doing that when a component-based architecture makes it so easy?"
Yeah, and an open component-based architecture makes it easy for everyone, not just those who can afford to throw some money in Microsoft's direction.
Having 3d graphics does not automatically make a game bad.
I think it does when it's applied to strategy or RTS games, I'm sorry to say.
I love FPS games as much as the next guy, I probably have an online bash with UT2004 3 or 4 times a week for an hour or so but 3D graphics killed the playability of RTS games.
I was quite happy with the "top down" sprite views in Red Alert, Total Annihilation, Starcraft & Warcraft 2, none of those games were any less enjoyable for not being able to rotate views or zoom in and out of the map.
Then I bought Ground Control (one of the first RTS games to have 3D graphics) and just found it totally unplayable albeit that it was getting good reviews in magazines - I haven't touched it to this day but still play all the others I've mentioned.
Unfortunately, I can only put this down to laziness of the games designers rather than technological advancement - I'm not a programmer but it strikes me it's probably much easier to map textures round a 3D model & let the computern handle animation rather than manually drawing a sprite image for each animation frame.
The fact is that it's marketing of graphics cards that means every games has to have 3D graphics even though it doesn't necessarily need it & that really has now killed the RTS and strategy genre games.
MoO2 was a game that I played endlessly for a while until I discovered that the AI openly cheats.
I must admit that I did always play the game by holding every other race at bay with diplomacy and just racing ahead with technology until the end of the game to the point where I could wipe out battlefleets of 50+ enemy ships with only a handful of mine. The problem was that I'd take out a huge fleet of ships and two turns later, a fleet of equivalent power from the same race would turn up again... and again...
I'm afraid that really killed any reason for me to continue playing the game although I thoroughly enjoyed it & hope the FreeOrion project really does something better with the concept in the future.
An asshole is a person too blinkered in their attitude and too lacking in their knowledge to realise that they might actually be doing themselves out of some free entertainment by making generalisations like you are.
Commercial people are paid to make games that make a profit for the creating company, not to make good games. Games sales these days are as much about product branding as they are about good quality. Sure, there are a lot of good games out there but they are a minority amongst the bland, overpriced dross that fills most of the computer store shelves.
So would one or more of those people who posted negative comments about FreeCiv like to explain what's so wrong with enjoying old game formats.
I accept that Civilisation is not a game for everyone but if I don't mind you racing round a track in a car sim, why do you give a damn about this?
Not everyone, particularly the older generation like me, believes that graphical complexity lies at the heart of a good game - it's as much about mechanics and gameplay which is why retrogaming is so popular currently. Some people agree, others disagree, so what?
I'd remind these same people that original Doom is over ten years old now, the mechanics of it serve as the basis of just about every FPS ever written & original Doom is still being commercially ported to platforms like the Gameboy Advance even to this day.
Civilisation is, in itself, a milestone in computer gaming, albeit one focused more on strategy rather than action - however, again, its mechanics are at the core of many current day RTS games also...
As far as I'm concerned, the fools are the people who ignore a game purely because its old, not the rest of us who enjoy playing old and new games purely because of their entertainment value.
And, while we're at it, a big pat on the pack to the programmers involved in FreeCiv - kudos to them for their devotion in making FreeCiv one of the longest on-going OSS game projects there is.
The laptop I am typing this on runs Linux. I am running KDE and have a web browser, office package, DVD player, CD Burner, music ripping and playing apps, development tools & network analysis tools on it.
I have a few games installed, I can read and post to Usenet from it, I can do P2P filesharing on it and I can chat to MSN, AIM, IRC, etc users perfectly happily.
I have a USB printer that works fine that I can plug in and out and use when I like, my USB memory stick works on it, as do my PCMCIA & USB hard disks.
This is about all I need to do on my "desktop" so quite clearly, for me, Linux is capable of doing all I need it to.
Yes, it took me a while to set up a few of the things I needed but then I wasn't aware that the definition of "desktop" included a time factor.
If you want to tell me that Linux can be more difficult to set up than Windows, then I will agree with you.
If you want to tell me it takes more time to learn than Windows, then I will agree with you.
If you want to tell me that it takes longer to administer than a Windows PC, then I will disagree with you because I spend as much time updating virus checkers, patches, spyware tools on the Windows 2000 laptop sat next to it as I do adminstering my Linux machine - probably more time in fact.
So please, define "desktop" for me because how can I possibly agree or disagree with you when I don't even understand what you are talking about...
Whoever thinks Linux has been designed or aimed as a "Windows killer" ends up just demonstrating they understand nothing about the FOSS movement.
Firstly, people were giving away software long before anyone thought of making money from it (let's face it, that's how UNIX took off in the first place). And whilst the big players in the commercial software world have risen to get to where they are today, there have always been people giving software away whether you used a PC, Amiga, Commodore 64, etc. The fact that free software is so prevalent today is due to more people writing it, sure, but that's because the Internet allows programmers to form communities and distribute what they've written much easier. What I'm trying to illustrate is that Windows, as a commercial operating system, became popular despite a FOSS movement being there anyway.
Secondly, many Windows users and supporters always seem to forget a very basic, intrinsic concept - Linux is just the operating system kernel; everything else is FOSS software, much of which can only run sensibly in a UNIX-type environment but a great proportion of it is available to run on Windows perfectly happily - Mozilla, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. etc. So FOSS software benefits anyone on any OS, not just Linux.
Thirdly, a lot of Linux users are angry at Microsoft & the media turns in into a "Windows v Linux" war. However, the anger (amongst the non-zealot FOSS community) is actually aimed more at proprietary file formats that are deliberately designed to lock users into particular OSes and applications. Remember, for any specific task in Linux, there are probably several applications to choose from to perform that task - therefore, FOSS users are used to choice and do not like being locked into specific vendors purely because a closed file format restricts them to using MS Office, etc. Who cares whether a file is in."doc", ".ppt" or ".xls" format as long as you don't have to change your whole way of working and operating system in order to read those formats.
There are no killers here, no "victories", just people exercising their rights to use what software they like when they like using.
$350,000 is a menial sum compared to some of the huge fraud that happens in the Western World (just look at Worldcom as an example).
However, outsourcing to people in less developed parts of the world means that much smaller (and presumably more "readily available") sums of money can provide them with a very good living still & make committing fraud worthwhile in the firstplace.
There are no intended racial overtones in these comments, just observations, and quite frankly it's the mega-corporations I laugh at now that they will start to get their "just desserts" for messing up the economies and lives of so many people for the sake of a few bucks.
Let's face it, if you're a Citibank (if that's who it is) customer that got ripped off by this, you'll get your money back anyway because it's obviously a security issue with the bank themselves, not the customer's fault.
I say good luck to the Indian call centre workers - they're being used as the 21st century equivalent of sweatshop labourers anyway so they should grab what they can before they demand too high wages and they themselves get dumped by the corporations like a lot of the rest of us have.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but clever usage of "grep", "lynx -dump" and a "for" loop in a quickly hacked up shell script would give we Linux geeks the extra time we need to save at least one PC and the beers from the refridgerator...
My cat's stuck up a tree
My brother's bleeding on the ground
He's cut an artery
The dog's just chewed a cable
My neice has cut her head
There's axemen in my garden and
They're burning down the shed
My middle finger's severed
As I dial my bloodied phone
Tap nine-one-one on keypad
But all I get's ring tone
While Billy makes his billions
My house is getting fired
I should have paid the monthly fee
Before my code expired
Sure, what's the problem?
After all, if your PC burns to cinders in a house fire, they're going to want to get there quick to sell you a new Windows XP license!
And think about being rushed to hospital in childbirth? Get that newborn signed up to MSDN the moment it's head pops out!
"... I can get the fire service to you by, erm, next Thursday afternoon?"
Predictable response and you're in between a rock and a hard place no matter what answer you give - after all, if you admit to it, no-one's going to take you seriously on security any more...
It's a shame I didn't keep some of the original discussions about this because your site was definitely stated as the source from where our email addresses were obtained.
Why "move"? Dual boot it, play with it and move when and if you're ready to.
It's amazing that a company that hosts the richest man in the world can't cope with the innovation of an 'inferior' (I'm being facetious here, not trolling) business model.
The problem with Windows security is one of architecture, not so much business model.
When a UNIX system gets attacked, it's because some cracker or script-kiddie has picked that system as a target - because of a buggy service that can be buffer overflowed, maybe because of a weak password on an account or maybe because of a file permissions issue. However, all these vulnerabilities can be corrected by a sysadmin who knows what he's doing and applies patches, tunrs of unnecessary services and locks permissions down. Bastille is just a tool that does the vulnerability analyis for the sysadmin and makes recommendations, maybe even carries some out.
Windows, by design, has to allow certain applications full access to the system. That's why attacks on Windows systems are not usually targetted attacks but worms and viruses that can exploit a design weakness to get in and do their stuff on any Windows systems they find. So where as you know the likely points of intrusion into a UNIX system, you don't on Windows until either a worm hits it or MS release an update telling you what they've fixed.
You can't say that either UNIX or Windows is more secure than the other out of the box but a good UNIX sysadmin has much more chance of predicting and preventing attacks than a good Windows sysadmin does.
Unfortunately, you're lost on the context in which you would use Bastille.
AV packages and XP firewall are more desktop orientated security applications that usually provide a second layer of security protection after corporate firewalls, NAT routers, proxies, etc.
And whether you like it or not, there are security holes in Windows purely as a result of the architecture and the fact that a lot of applications have free access to any part of the system.
If you have similar security holes in Linux it's because you're running a service at root permissions or have some file permissions set wrongly. You might not be using a UNIX system that has strong password checking built in or you might have inactive accounts on your system. All these things the types of issues checked by Bastille.
Sure, you could use Bastille on a UNIX/Linux desktop to lock it down a bit but it's real use is for locking down services and maybe creating a server to hide desktops behind, like a NAT proxy. So it's more important in small office or home server use where a server needs to be doubly secure because you don't have the protection of two firewall layers that you will inevitably find in a corporate environment.
It's not really "portable" in the same sense as, say, Mozilla Firefox.
I've not used Bastille in a while but I recall it's more of a tool that makes recommendations and changes to your system to lock it down - these can be everything from file permissions, service lockdown and kernel firewall settings.
Therefore it's very much tied to the UNIX topography and even if you got it to run on Windows, the architecture is so different that it would be a totally different application by the time you'd modified it enough.
However, you might want to consider running Bastille on, say, a Linux NAT/proxy router and just tucking Windows machines behind it.
Perhaps he should have used Bastille himself...
1. Then you are an exception rather than the rule. I know of no-one in my circle of friends & work colleagues who has ever bought a boxed MS operating system or product. Sure, a few of them have bought complete PCs with Windows on, but most build their own and just use copies of MS CDs.
2. I know (or care) nothing about MS EULAs but I wasn't aware that they covered home use. Sure, if you have a company laptop that you take home, that's okay but if it's your own PC then it does not fall under what your company purchased as bulk licenses from MS.
3. Agreed, but then the morons have fallen for the marketing hype about PCs being easy to use and maintain. MS and PC vendors are to blame for this so if they have complaining morons as customers, they can blame their marketing people.
4. As in point 3, it is if MS have played you for an idiot and got you to part with your money in the first place.
5. If I keep my English ale then that's fine because it means there's more of it for me! :-)
At least then if you need to add parallel port support suddenly, you just need a couple of minutes to compile the module up.
Just my tuppence worth...
Invariably 90% of them have never paid for their copy of it believing themselves to be under the Microsoft "I use it at work so I can install it on 12 PCs at home" Licence or the Microsoft "My mate gets the MSDN CDs and he's allowed to let anyone else use them" License.
I wonder how many of the same people would be so vocal if they had to shell out £200 for a copy?
Me? I use OpenOffice and can save my pennies for 100 pints of fine English real ale while sleeping soundly and night knowing I'm not contributing to Bill and Melinda's sorrow at being unable to afford a new extension this year due to all those "naughty little Office pirates".
Perhaps I can then be of some assistance to you.
If you would like to share with me some specifics about the exploits you've suffered from in your usage of Linux, I will be more than happy to provide you with some advice on security techniques and server hardening if you so wish.
I look forward to you providing me with the name and version of Linux distribution you are currently using that is suffering these problems. Once I have that information, I can then give you some detailed assistance with your issues.
Actually, it strike me as common sense.
Firstly, how much of what Microsoft produces do you honestly believe is created because the users have demanded it? I'll tell you the answer, none of it.
Since around Office 97, Microsoft has simply been adding features & formats to Office purely to create some justification to users to go spend more money on an upgrade - most users are too innocent & trusting to know what they want and probably around 90% of them use about 10% of Office's core features.
Added to this, why in heck do we need another document format purely to embed video in it? Web developers already do that every day of their lives using HTML and embedding some Marcomedia Flash in it... talk about Microsoft re-inventing the wheel...
Instead you see a chance to push the UNIX philosophy down people's throats. This is classic flawed OSS thinking.
Actually, you're thinking is totally flawed. OSS does not equal UNIX; otherwise, please explain how come OpenOffice also runs on Windows?
You can't replace the .doc format until you understand what people use it for.
They use it because it's there. They do and use what Microsoft tells them to because they do not have any inkling about the ramifications of using a closed information format means to the distribution of information.
"why would any sane developer want to prevent someone from doing that when a component-based architecture makes it so easy?"
Yeah, and an open component-based architecture makes it easy for everyone, not just those who can afford to throw some money in Microsoft's direction.
I think it does when it's applied to strategy or RTS games, I'm sorry to say.
I love FPS games as much as the next guy, I probably have an online bash with UT2004 3 or 4 times a week for an hour or so but 3D graphics killed the playability of RTS games.
I was quite happy with the "top down" sprite views in Red Alert, Total Annihilation, Starcraft & Warcraft 2, none of those games were any less enjoyable for not being able to rotate views or zoom in and out of the map.
Then I bought Ground Control (one of the first RTS games to have 3D graphics) and just found it totally unplayable albeit that it was getting good reviews in magazines - I haven't touched it to this day but still play all the others I've mentioned.
Unfortunately, I can only put this down to laziness of the games designers rather than technological advancement - I'm not a programmer but it strikes me it's probably much easier to map textures round a 3D model & let the computern handle animation rather than manually drawing a sprite image for each animation frame.
The fact is that it's marketing of graphics cards that means every games has to have 3D graphics even though it doesn't necessarily need it & that really has now killed the RTS and strategy genre games.
I must admit that I did always play the game by holding every other race at bay with diplomacy and just racing ahead with technology until the end of the game to the point where I could wipe out battlefleets of 50+ enemy ships with only a handful of mine. The problem was that I'd take out a huge fleet of ships and two turns later, a fleet of equivalent power from the same race would turn up again... and again...
I'm afraid that really killed any reason for me to continue playing the game although I thoroughly enjoyed it & hope the FreeOrion project really does something better with the concept in the future.
An asshole is a person too blinkered in their attitude and too lacking in their knowledge to realise that they might actually be doing themselves out of some free entertainment by making generalisations like you are.
Commercial people are paid to make games that make a profit for the creating company, not to make good games. Games sales these days are as much about product branding as they are about good quality. Sure, there are a lot of good games out there but they are a minority amongst the bland, overpriced dross that fills most of the computer store shelves.
I accept that Civilisation is not a game for everyone but if I don't mind you racing round a track in a car sim, why do you give a damn about this?
Not everyone, particularly the older generation like me, believes that graphical complexity lies at the heart of a good game - it's as much about mechanics and gameplay which is why retrogaming is so popular currently. Some people agree, others disagree, so what?
I'd remind these same people that original Doom is over ten years old now, the mechanics of it serve as the basis of just about every FPS ever written & original Doom is still being commercially ported to platforms like the Gameboy Advance even to this day.
Civilisation is, in itself, a milestone in computer gaming, albeit one focused more on strategy rather than action - however, again, its mechanics are at the core of many current day RTS games also...
As far as I'm concerned, the fools are the people who ignore a game purely because its old, not the rest of us who enjoy playing old and new games purely because of their entertainment value.
And, while we're at it, a big pat on the pack to the programmers involved in FreeCiv - kudos to them for their devotion in making FreeCiv one of the longest on-going OSS game projects there is.
What OS do you have running in that nifty engine management system in your car?
What's running on those firmware chips inside that neat little broadband router you just bought?
What's driving that new VoIP PBX system in your office?
Why does an OS that is free to use need to tell you what its name is?
...if I'm first to mention the word "iPod" even though I don't own one?
"Good afternoon, sir, welcome to McDonalds. What can I get you?"
"I'd like a quarterpounder with cheese, please."
"I'm sorry, sir, we just sell Filets O Fish."
"Oh. Can I not have a Big Mac then?"
"No, sir, we only have Filets O Fish."
"Fries? Coke? Apple pie?"
"No, sir, as I said, just Filets O Fish."
That's what a world without choice is like - revel in diversity!
The laptop I am typing this on runs Linux. I am running KDE and have a web browser, office package, DVD player, CD Burner, music ripping and playing apps, development tools & network analysis tools on it.
I have a few games installed, I can read and post to Usenet from it, I can do P2P filesharing on it and I can chat to MSN, AIM, IRC, etc users perfectly happily.
I have a USB printer that works fine that I can plug in and out and use when I like, my USB memory stick works on it, as do my PCMCIA & USB hard disks.
This is about all I need to do on my "desktop" so quite clearly, for me, Linux is capable of doing all I need it to.
Yes, it took me a while to set up a few of the things I needed but then I wasn't aware that the definition of "desktop" included a time factor.
If you want to tell me that Linux can be more difficult to set up than Windows, then I will agree with you.
If you want to tell me it takes more time to learn than Windows, then I will agree with you.
If you want to tell me that it takes longer to administer than a Windows PC, then I will disagree with you because I spend as much time updating virus checkers, patches, spyware tools on the Windows 2000 laptop sat next to it as I do adminstering my Linux machine - probably more time in fact.
So please, define "desktop" for me because how can I possibly agree or disagree with you when I don't even understand what you are talking about...
Firstly, people were giving away software long before anyone thought of making money from it (let's face it, that's how UNIX took off in the first place). And whilst the big players in the commercial software world have risen to get to where they are today, there have always been people giving software away whether you used a PC, Amiga, Commodore 64, etc. The fact that free software is so prevalent today is due to more people writing it, sure, but that's because the Internet allows programmers to form communities and distribute what they've written much easier. What I'm trying to illustrate is that Windows, as a commercial operating system, became popular despite a FOSS movement being there anyway.
Secondly, many Windows users and supporters always seem to forget a very basic, intrinsic concept - Linux is just the operating system kernel; everything else is FOSS software, much of which can only run sensibly in a UNIX-type environment but a great proportion of it is available to run on Windows perfectly happily - Mozilla, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. etc. So FOSS software benefits anyone on any OS, not just Linux.
Thirdly, a lot of Linux users are angry at Microsoft & the media turns in into a "Windows v Linux" war. However, the anger (amongst the non-zealot FOSS community) is actually aimed more at proprietary file formats that are deliberately designed to lock users into particular OSes and applications. Remember, for any specific task in Linux, there are probably several applications to choose from to perform that task - therefore, FOSS users are used to choice and do not like being locked into specific vendors purely because a closed file format restricts them to using MS Office, etc. Who cares whether a file is in ."doc", ".ppt" or ".xls" format as long as you don't have to change your whole way of working and operating system in order to read those formats.
There are no killers here, no "victories", just people exercising their rights to use what software they like when they like using.
End of story.
My company already runs Windows on desktops and there's more than enough "chaos" during the day without more needed during the night...
However, outsourcing to people in less developed parts of the world means that much smaller (and presumably more "readily available") sums of money can provide them with a very good living still & make committing fraud worthwhile in the firstplace.
There are no intended racial overtones in these comments, just observations, and quite frankly it's the mega-corporations I laugh at now that they will start to get their "just desserts" for messing up the economies and lives of so many people for the sake of a few bucks.
Let's face it, if you're a Citibank (if that's who it is) customer that got ripped off by this, you'll get your money back anyway because it's obviously a security issue with the bank themselves, not the customer's fault.
I say good luck to the Indian call centre workers - they're being used as the 21st century equivalent of sweatshop labourers anyway so they should grab what they can before they demand too high wages and they themselves get dumped by the corporations like a lot of the rest of us have.
[INSERT LOUD SCORNING "HA! HA!" HERE]