-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Or perhaps the recently disclosed compromise of ftp.gnu.org? A Unix (or Unix-Like) system running software based on established internet design standards adopted by the ruling standards body (IETF) after intense study and open participation from all parties who were interested. And to the people who think that Unix only has a budget of about $1 million and Microsoft should do better with their $60 billion budget (or however big it is)...guess again. IBM, Sun, HP...those names ring any bells? When you come up with a secure replacement, let us know, because *nix certainly ain't it. Doesn't matter how rabid a proponent of MS, or Red Hat, or Sun, or SUSE you are, ignoring that fact is a quick way to get rooted. - -- William S. Duncanson caesar@starkreality.com The driving force behind the NC is the belief that the companies who brought us things like Unix, relational databases, and Windows can make an appliance that is inexpensive and easy to use if they choose to do that. - -- Scott Adams
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Wayne E. Bouchard Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 16:19 To: Stephen J. Wilcox Cc: Len Rose; *Hobbit*; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: How much longer..
Well, two things here..
First, UNIX has more than it's share of vulnerabilities. For those of you who can remember the "HP Bug a day" list? Or how about the numerous problems with sendmail or BIND? Sure, all these problems have been corrected as they've been discovered but I wouldn't wanna take odds on how many older instances of these programs exist. And the vulnerabilities still come in for local users from the various OS vendors. Not to mention various problems with IP stacks and so forth.
For those of you who think this is just a windows problem, think again. The reason for the severity of impact is simply because of the pervasiveness of the single OS. You don't find these things under UNIX simply because it's too hard to make it work. (You have so many different OS varients, people running different MTA's, web servers, nameservers, etc, etc.) With Microsoft, it has become so ubiquitous that it's easy to find 10,000 servers running the same buggy stuff in a short period of time.
Second: Isn't OS bashing just a bit off topic?
On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 07:48:08PM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Len Rose wrote:
Hi.. just think if the billions of dollars being spent on M$ products could have been funneled into open source projects.
To reinforce the point in the most blunt manner possible:
No one had ever better dare postulate that the inherent reason for all of the vulnerabilities in Micro$oft products are due to any special features of note.
There is no particular network-enabled feature that Windows has that UNIX didn't implement years before and has done so securely following established internet design standards adopted by the ruling standards body (IETF) after intense study and open
participation
from all parties who were interested.
Now knee-jerk reactions by various network operators is to filter, filter, filter and soon, by the grace of a piece of crap operating system you'll have a much more limited internet to work with because for Micro$oft's sake they've filtered everything.
Hey I like MS bashing as much as anyone else but the fact is you could say this of any vendor.. a good recent example being Cisco
--- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude
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