This is a living nightmare I don't have to face almost 1,5 years now. Since I left windows and switched to unix-like operating system that is. I cannot really catch up with how serious it has become since I don't have to deal with it. I do recall though the days using windows. Every single day updating, scanning, updating, scanning... I mean, the percentages became frightening. People need to wake up and realize that you cannot spend precious time of your day risking your computers purity and security. Maybe some people should consider making the switch after all.
For this whole idea of the author to hold there are a few things to be taken as facts.
First of all, this virus/trojan thing. I have never, ever seen a trojan or ever had to "meet" one so far using BSD or Linux. And this is not only because people just don't care about unix-like systems in order to create viruses and trojans for them. It is the architecture of the system itself that doesn't really help anyone create something catastrophic. And you have to execute somehow this catastrophic thing in order to get damaged. How? Through the web browser? Hardly. Oh, I got it. Email. I see this nice, for example, sexy.pl file and I say "oh so nice, let me execute it". Not really.
Secondly, users of unix-like systems are certainly not random users. At least the majority. They have at least some respectable amount of knowledge and they know what they are doing, the emails they are viewing, the attatchments they execute, the websites they visit. So the whole story about viruses and stuff that will delete the files at your home directory is really nonsense. The only way to get "hacked" somehow is because you will ignore basic security habits like running services on you account for example. Let's blame user ignorance and stupidity and then judge if a system is secure or not and if it protects you from your ignorance and stupidity.
Finally, this sense of security is real. If you don't believe me take the average day of a windows user. "I have to update my antivirus, check for new spyware definitions, check..., scan..." and so on and so forth. Is this a sense of security? Hardly.
And more specifically testing approaches. Use a standard procedure. Choose the appropriate software engineering model(waterfall,rad, spiral and so on) according to what you have right now and have release cycles along with testing periods. Black and white box testing are the ones I can recall right now. Of course beta testing helps a lot also. This is a crash-safe approach to a crash-free application, in my opinion, although there is no such thing really.
First of all, I don't understand why everybody wants to "hug" his/her mobile phone more and more when they are so harmful. Second, there is no such thing as legal file sharing really. Almost everything is illegal in a file sharing network. Until now they were keeping track of interesting IP and they were tracing the users in order to press charges. Now they will charge you a fine on your next mobile phone bill of every copyrighted piece of data you exchange willingly over the phone. On the other hand, who cares. Everybody is doing it up until now. And everybody is making fun of "getting caught". Until they actually get caught.
Like I have said many times before, it's all about google and their data mining tactics. Gmail, Google toolbar and now this. Who knows what else we are not aware of. The invasion of privacy has become ridiculous. So ridiculous that nobody really cares anymore. Take a look also at what google-watch.org has to say about google.
First of all this pack targets Windows users only, which leaves the rest of the market share totally unaffected. This is not necessarily a bad thing since I don't like the contents of the google pack. Especially the "Google Tools", Google toolbar. In my opinion this is another "shiny", "nicely folded" marketing and data mining attempt targeting once more the most clueless share of the market, Windows users, that will happily download it cause "it's Google, it's nice".
As far as I have heard though, there have been also cases where SCSI have failed also. In any case though, we lack of a good way of predicting hard drives that are about to "die". Don't forget also that not everybody can aford buying a SCSI drive. And what about laptop users? SCSI drives are not a standard in laptop don't you think? Now, imagine an new generation of hard drives that would have, let's say, slightly better performance than the existing ones and they would have also a way to warn you when something is going wrong. In car services for example, nowadays, the plug the laptop on your car and they execute a full check on your car's condition. Picture this in hard drives. Then I would seriously consider buying a hard drive like that, even if the price was slightly above normal.
DVD and CD are two very, very unreliable mediums for storing data. And for some people storing data is an important part of their lives. Besides that, most people treat DVDs and CDs very clamsy. You don't even know which scratch is going to be "the lethal one". On the other hand I would appreciate the fact if some people would bother creating reliable hard drives that do not die unexpectedly. At least to have a way to warn the user before they die. It is awful to live with the fear that one day, you don't know which, your HD will die. And S.M.A.R.T. is not always reliable.
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This is a living nightmare I don't have to face almost 1,5 years now. Since I left windows and switched to unix-like operating system that is. I cannot really catch up with how serious it has become since I don't have to deal with it. I do recall though the days using windows. Every single day updating, scanning, updating, scanning... I mean, the percentages became frightening. People need to wake up and realize that you cannot spend precious time of your day risking your computers purity and security. Maybe some people should consider making the switch after all.
Well, having a box like this on the net is like looking for trouble :) But yes, you are right, recovery is easy and fast.
For this whole idea of the author to hold there are a few things to be taken as facts.
First of all, this virus/trojan thing. I have never, ever seen a trojan or ever had to "meet" one so far using BSD or Linux. And this is not only because people just don't care about unix-like systems in order to create viruses and trojans for them. It is the architecture of the system itself that doesn't really help anyone create something catastrophic. And you have to execute somehow this catastrophic thing in order to get damaged. How? Through the web browser? Hardly. Oh, I got it. Email. I see this nice, for example, sexy.pl file and I say "oh so nice, let me execute it". Not really.
Secondly, users of unix-like systems are certainly not random users. At least the majority. They have at least some respectable amount of knowledge and they know what they are doing, the emails they are viewing, the attatchments they execute, the websites they visit. So the whole story about viruses and stuff that will delete the files at your home directory is really nonsense. The only way to get "hacked" somehow is because you will ignore basic security habits like running services on you account for example. Let's blame user ignorance and stupidity and then judge if a system is secure or not and if it protects you from your ignorance and stupidity.
Finally, this sense of security is real. If you don't believe me take the average day of a windows user. "I have to update my antivirus, check for new spyware definitions, check..., scan..." and so on and so forth. Is this a sense of security? Hardly.
And more specifically testing approaches. Use a standard procedure. Choose the appropriate software engineering model(waterfall,rad, spiral and so on) according to what you have right now and have release cycles along with testing periods. Black and white box testing are the ones I can recall right now. Of course beta testing helps a lot also. This is a crash-safe approach to a crash-free application, in my opinion, although there is no such thing really.
Well, don't do the crime if you can't do the time they say :)
That's quite a good payback" in my opinion.
I don't have a source, just look around you.
The files are copyrighted, thus, the act is illegal.
Fine you.
First of all, I don't understand why everybody wants to "hug" his/her mobile phone more and more when they are so harmful. Second, there is no such thing as legal file sharing really. Almost everything is illegal in a file sharing network. Until now they were keeping track of interesting IP and they were tracing the users in order to press charges. Now they will charge you a fine on your next mobile phone bill of every copyrighted piece of data you exchange willingly over the phone. On the other hand, who cares. Everybody is doing it up until now. And everybody is making fun of "getting caught". Until they actually get caught.
Like I have said many times before, it's all about google and their data mining tactics. Gmail, Google toolbar and now this. Who knows what else we are not aware of. The invasion of privacy has become ridiculous. So ridiculous that nobody really cares anymore. Take a look also at what google-watch.org has to say about google.
First of all this pack targets Windows users only, which leaves the rest of the market share totally unaffected. This is not necessarily a bad thing since I don't like the contents of the google pack. Especially the "Google Tools", Google toolbar. In my opinion this is another "shiny", "nicely folded" marketing and data mining attempt targeting once more the most clueless share of the market, Windows users, that will happily download it cause "it's Google, it's nice".
As far as I have heard though, there have been also cases where SCSI have failed also. In any case though, we lack of a good way of predicting hard drives that are about to "die". Don't forget also that not everybody can aford buying a SCSI drive. And what about laptop users? SCSI drives are not a standard in laptop don't you think? Now, imagine an new generation of hard drives that would have, let's say, slightly better performance than the existing ones and they would have also a way to warn you when something is going wrong. In car services for example, nowadays, the plug the laptop on your car and they execute a full check on your car's condition. Picture this in hard drives. Then I would seriously consider buying a hard drive like that, even if the price was slightly above normal.
DVD and CD are two very, very unreliable mediums for storing data. And for some people storing data is an important part of their lives. Besides that, most people treat DVDs and CDs very clamsy. You don't even know which scratch is going to be "the lethal one". On the other hand I would appreciate the fact if some people would bother creating reliable hard drives that do not die unexpectedly. At least to have a way to warn the user before they die. It is awful to live with the fear that one day, you don't know which, your HD will die. And S.M.A.R.T. is not always reliable.