DHS and M$

[tom marinis]

--- Joel Hammer <Joel at hammershome.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 06:57:17AM -0500, David A. Bandel
> wrote:
> 
> > did I miss anything?
> 
> Yes, you did. The IS professionals they are going to hire
> don't know squat
> about anything but windows. Thus, they will need to buy MS
> boxes with everything
> pretty much set up for them.

Actually, in David's own subtle way, he said just that...

 
> Besides, Homeland Security is about making America safer,
> which means
> protecting the American economy, which means MS$ Uber Alles. 

Which was my original point at general at linux-sxs.org,
condensed considerably...

 
> And, if Homeland Security went with linux, every hacker in the
> Middle
> East would be trying to hack into their computers, and they
> would have
> the source code to help them. With windows, I suspect that
> only a handful
> of trusted friends (Russia, Israel, France, China, and a few
> others),
> have the windows source code. And, they likely don't want to
> advertise
> it and therefore won't bother hacking around with Homeland
> Security,
> which isn't directed against them, anyway.

Uhm, sorry Joel.

Bullshit.  

I may see a new trend that MS might demand H.S. to go with,
but I don't see this kind of thing being able to happen 
at all with Open Source.


Since when has Unix gotten over 75,000+ viruses
to protect itself from, have remote system back doors and
other garbage letting in all the goofs on the internet?


Even though Unix is around 15 years older, MS Windows and
Dos are afflicted by at least 3 new viruses every day.
{ Symantec gave that estimate on their newest Anti-Virus
   Software products last year.  I hear it now may be going
   higher. }


>From what I've heard, seen, read, Linux and most of the 
other Unix-like systems out there, although suseptable to 
worms, I'm unaware of the more than 3 to 5 viruses that
the community is aware of currently for the Linux/UNIX OS.


If someone does write a virus for Linux, don't you think
someone, somewhere, would eventually find out who wrote it, and
find out something is wrong with that file or program?


Don't you think, when he's found out, that this guy's email,
website, ftp-site would be written up and in the future flagged
for all others to know?


Unless this guy is a real dumbass, and accidentally
incorporated this so-called virus into a program that he was
developing, that he's gonna get black-listed by the community?


Oh, it's been tried, but the virus or a corrupted file
doesn't get or spread very far.  Case in point;



OpenBSD's ftpsite in Alberta got broken into last year, and
someone fooled around with the latest OpenSSH package at the 
time. 

A simple check of the MD5 checksum proved the file at the
site did not match the file that was already checked.

Theo went quickly through the source, and the source from
the FTP site was proved that it was a hacked version.  Let's 
just say for the next 4 hours the 15 messages from Theo to the
misc at openbsd.org were, shall we say, quite blue....


Round trip time, 6 hour after a person posted was the
the program later replaced.

3 people that I know of that were on the misc at openbsd.org 
mailing list ( which I'm also a member of ) admitted that 
they had downloaded the offending program, and installed it.

All 3 people performed re-installs.

Theo never found out from where, but he give the 
University of Calgary's System Admin a tongue lashing 
for letting a student change something group permissions 
at the ftp site.

Just try to get something like that turn around time from MS 
on a defective piece of software.



So, I'm sorry Joel, that's a MS story about the 
source code for the kernel being abused by those
people from the middle east. 






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