Everyone, try to get away from IE and Outlook (1 Viewer)

[Paul Bartlet]

With all the Blaster and sobig virus stuff going on, everyone is nervous about mail/internet (and rightfully so). I've recently switched to Linux, more curious than anything really about it. I research alot into these types of things before I take the plunge. Doing so, I've learned a lot of whats wrong in the Microsoft world.
I'm not gonna bash Mircosoft here, but what I am gonna say is, most would be better off "Not" using Internet Explorer and Outlook (express included). They are both nice programs, there fault is, they really are "part" of the Operating System. A lot of the exploits you read about are a cause from this. They have read/write access that no "browser/email" client should have. The exploits and fixes keep coming, but I myself see no end in sight. Only reason I say this is, they shouldn't have the permission to do the things some virus/exploits tell them to do.

I'm no Linux expert, but what I do know of how different sorts of virus/exploit does not work in linux is like this -
I'm user "Paul", Paul has new mail, I open it, double click it, and it turns out to be a virus. When this virus tries to modify/delete "Important" system files, it fails. As "Paul" does not have the "Rights" to these files. This keeps Linux safe.
The problem with IE and Outlook is, Windows sees these programs as part of the Family. Sure, go ahead do this and do that, we're all family here. If a windows user were to be using "anything" other than these two programs, they wouldn't have the "access" that these two do (in some cases) In other cases, nothing keeps you safe.
Will switching to something else keep you safe, well No. But will decrease the chances of vital system files being currupted.
Read the Updates your getting from MircoSoft, most are for exploits for these two programs.
There are many good Browser and Email clients that are Free, at least try them.

my 2 cents :/

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Paul,

As much as I agree, in theory- i really think that any future useful computing for "average users" will be very much in a hand-holding, self-contained and very integrated environment. As much as experienced users like you and I might hate it, my mom needs applications that can interface in a powerful way with the OS, and hadle some tasks...

Granted there will be exploits, i think some of the ability for software to do more automated and meaningful tasks is the key to involving more people in computing. There has to be a happy medium somewhere.

-Vince

 

[Rob Gardiner]

I've tried various alternative browsers and e-mail programs over the years, but the lack of some vital feature always sends me back to MS. Another alternative is to always keep your OS patched and up-to-date. It is not difficult to make a Monday morning routine:

Update Virus Scan
Update Firewall
Check for Windows Patches
Synchronize Clock, etc.

Whenever a worm/virus/exploit makes national headlines, the patch has already been available for several weeks. Anyone who gets infected has no one to blame but himself.

 

[Paul Bartlet]

Vince, reading your post, I'm not to sure on how to answer really, no questions really asked.
Never really thought of "Mom" when I posted. I think back to how many times telling Mom and Dad how you can tape one program while viewing another :b So I understand your meaning in that regard.

Guess I'm hoping for one person tells another, and another and so on. Many of the free email/browser programs do work the same, just "look" different. Many get used to whats already there "IE and Outlook", and it's hard to get them to try something else.

I guess the real problem is, MicroSoft has made an excellent Operating System in terms of ease of use. At the same time, so many have found ways of exploiting this "ease of use".

 

[John Watson]

I'm old enuff to be somebody's dad, but I despise the witless enthusiasiam for speed and integration, I like stand-alone appplications, and sequential logic, rather than simultaneous opening of all doors, "just in case", that leaves me open to viruses, worms, whatever.

Good fences make good neighbours and all that!

As you can imagine, I find it very hard to find products or softwares for luddites like myself

Books are still fairly safe, tho I know of people who developed serious diseases from mouldy books.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Exactly.

I work in PC support for a large office full of people with, on the majority, zero technical experience. When a new virus or worm makes the rounds and I have to run around patching or cleaning machines that didn't take broadcast patching- I'm always asked "Why does this stuff happen."

And the answer is simple, the virus and worm element is a 100% trade off for ease of use. At any point a task or function is automated, there is some control lost- and an opening is made for that control to be seized by a rogue force.

The solution would be to get away from the automation and from the simplicity, but is that a reasonable trade off? When I look around today and see LITERALLY every household I can think of with one, two, even three computers- I think of what a far cry that is from the late 80's and early-90's... and the reason this happened it really because of things like (as much as I hate to say it out loud) Windows and American Online.

As much as most experienced users cringe at the prospect of paying $25 a month for dialup service through AOL, can you imagine setting your mother or grandmother up with anything else? The ease of use, and control and integration these services have offered open a very dangerous hole, certainly, but in the process open up a world of computing and communication to folks who might NEVER have tried otherwise.

For the record, i use Eudora for email and switch between IE and Mozilla for browsing (depending on my mood and site compatibility)--- But I'm not able to close my eyes to the fact that a lot of the integration offered by IE and a system like WINDOWS UPDATE will continue to make computing usable for those people in my office who really have no desire to do anything but communicate and function... and in an ideal world the software and hardware would be transparent to this goal.

To use an analogy famous around my office... they don't wanna know about how to bake bread, they don't wanna know about heating coil technology-- they just want a piece of toast.

And unless you want to close the door to computing for those people, I think the idea of integration and software that can truly alter, adjust and update the OS is a must.

-V

 

[Paul Bartlet]

Rob, this doesn't sound fair,

Whenever a worm/virus/exploit makes national headlines, the patch has already been available for several weeks. Anyone who gets infected has no one to blame but himself.

What about the 1st person, what about person 100 before patch is availible.

I dunno, but to me a "Patch" means "not complete", tell me, when can I purchase the Complete Windows that does not require patching so that only one is to blame (**cough MicroSoft cough**)?.

You are blaming the customer for an "un-patched" operating system. I beg to differ, we were sold software without all the bugs worked out, and those who are not up date on the patches to repair the software are to blame ?.

My posts intention was to hopefully help someone/anyone avoid "some" of the exploits of "windows". Again, read the patches you getting, most are for IE and Outlook.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

tell me, when can I purchase the Complete Windows that does not require patching so that only one is to blame

But you wont find that with any modern operating system. They all have their bugs and holes. Windows gets targetted because it's the most popular. When Linux reaches a high % proportion of desktop PCs (not any time in the forseeable future) they'll be just as many virii and whatnot. Of course, Linux is more secure by default, but it can be hopelessly open in the hands of an inexperienced user.

 

[Steve_Ch]

I run Win 2000 on 2 of my machines, Win Xp Home on another, Win XP Pro on yet another, and 98lite on yet another.

I don't use any MS mail client on any of these (I use Pocomail, which I beleive Ron here highly recommended in one of the threads).

I think what's relevant here is if anybody is really concerned with the MS bundling of IE and Outlook, try 98lite, which allows one to strip off almost everything, including the MS HMTL engine. I run my strip down 98lite with Opera (it has its own HTML engine) and Pocomail, a machine that's on a PII 300, 64MB and 4G runs faster than an XP machine (similar task) on a PIII 500, 384MB of memory. The best thing is the setup is easy to use, as I just loan my 98lite to a non tech friend of mine because of her system broke down, and she took the machine and just run with it.

 

[Ken Chan]

Whenever a worm/virus/exploit makes national headlines, the patch has already been available for several weeks.

Not always. I got hit by Nachi last week (the first virus I've personally seen in years) and it had been discovered the day before. Luckily, I have VirusScan AutoUpdate signatures every day.

//Ken

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Paul,

I dunno, but to me a "Patch" means "not complete", tell me, when can I purchase the Complete Windows that does not require patching so that only one is to blame (**cough MicroSoft cough**)?.

Computer security is a game of measures and counter-measures. Every time someone comes up with a better lock, someone else comes up with a better lockpick.

 

[Diallo B]

Computer security is a game of measures and counter-measures. Every time someone comes up with a better lock, someone else comes up with a better lockpick.

IMO, these are the two best comments on this thread. There is nothing on this planet, electronic/solid state/whatever, that is 100 percent secure. It is up to us as individual technology users to make sure that what we own is protected.

As a matter of fact, I purposely make sure that my friends and family keep updated virus scanners, spyware blockers and operating systems because if something happens to one of their computers they will be calling me and wasting hours of my time.

Since I have taken a proactive stance in making sure that they keep their computers updated I have not had to make any emergency computer repair runs in a while.

As someone stated, by the time our tabloid news outlets (FOXnews, MSNBC, CNN, ABC and CBS) get ahold of some news about a virus or something the patch has been out for a few weeks. They simply sensationalize the event. For the most recent bigtime worm that was broadcast on tabloid news I had the patch for at least 3-4 weeks before I heard about it on the news.

And for the unfortunate percentage of a percentage that gets hit first with a nasty virus, we all know that we need to keep our info and settings backed up just in case of such an event. Backups are like car insurance; It sure is a pain to pay the insurance company but when you get into some accident you are glad that you did.

Well, the folks that want to pick on Microsoft go ahead. You are right when you state that the programs are allowed to do too much. However, if you are proactive about your computer's security you more than likely will not have to worry about some nasty virus taking your computer down.

djb

 

[Rob Gillespie]

But an inexperienced user wouldn't change the defaults. Windows has too many services and features enabled out of the box.

This is very true, however MS are taking steps to reverse this in their newer products. Alledgedly.

However an inexperienced user may well get fed up with Linux pretty quick when he discovers that on-screen fonts look crap, that there's about three different control panels, that there's several different window 'explorers' and that there's no obvious (if any) way of turning off the mouse movement acceleration. It's stuff like that which annoys the hell out of people new to Linux. It still pisses me off and I've been using it off-and-on for a while.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Not always. I got hit by Nachi last week (the first virus I've personally seen in years) and it had been discovered the day before. Luckily, I have VirusScan AutoUpdate signatures every day.

If you had the RPC patch installed Ken, it shouldn't have hit you at all.

 

[Ken Chan]

Yes, I thought I had. But the point is that a new virus can spread very quickly, that an update may not have already been available for "several weeks", and that updating weekly may not be enough.

//Ken

 

[Patrick Larkin]

However an inexperienced user may well get fed up with Linux pretty quick when he discovers that on-screen fonts look crap, that there's about three different control panels, that there's several different window 'explorers' and that there's no obvious (if any) way of turning off the mouse movement acceleration. It's stuff like that which annoys the hell out of people new to Linux. It still pisses me off and I've been using it off-and-on for a while.

The very reason droves of Linux users are switching to MacOS X. The security and power of Unix that looks beautiful and can natively run Office, Photoshop, etc and NINE browsers.

And as one poster noted, Windows isn't a victim because its the most popular. Windows is vulnerable because it is poorly written with security as an afterthought.

Washington Post: Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design

The problem is that Windows imapacts those of us not using it. Internet congestion, bogus emails, rogue Windows systems acting as bots launching DoS attacks, and the list goes on. Its one thing after another, the Registry, Outlook, IE exploits, open ports, SQL Server, IIS exploits.

We have over 2000 computers and thankfully 90% of them are Macintosh or Unix. We have ZERO issues with security and viruses. For servers, we run all (for the most part) open source applications on OS X and have never been hacked. We did have one incident when a copier that had a print server running Solaris was hacked and launched DoS attacks on Windows computers all over the internet.

I honestly can't understand why someone would use Windows unless they had to...

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I honestly can't understand why someone would use Windows unless they had to...

Cost of hardware.

If someone can get OS X running on an Intel/AMD platform - I'm interested.

 

[Thomas Newton]

If someone can get OS X running on an Intel/AMD platform - I'm interested.

Apple's interested in the hardware dollars for your next computer, same as Dell or anyone else.

 

[Masood Ali]

Linux is simply not an option for a majority of computer users. I'm not going to install Linux on my parent's PC because all they want is a simple GUI, plug & play support for all their hardware, and compatibility for major software.

OS X offers that, but the current price/perfomance ratio of buying an OS X capable machine is much, much lower than that of a Windows capable machine. For example, even with one of my aging 1Ghz Athlon PCs, I can go to Fry's and drop $200 for a new motherboard, a fast Pentium 4, and some RAM, and have a competitively fast PC again for a fraction of the cost of a new Mac.

The age old argument between Macs & PCs boils down to money in the bitter end. I think if I could run to Fry's and pick up a G5 motherboard and processor, I'd have no good reason not to run OS X. But to plunk down $1500 for a new G5 tower; that's not going to happen anytime soon.

 

[Thomas Newton]

You do not need a G5 to run Mac OS X -- even if you limit your search to new Macs.

An Apple eMac with FireWire, a DVD burner, AppleWorks, and the iApps goes for around $1,300 (17" CRT included). This is about $1,000 cheaper than a similar configuration based on an entry-level G5. But it is a very functional machine, especially with the addition of a multi-button mouse and a stick of quality third-party memory.

It's nice that you could make your old machine faster with a new motherboard. But the new motherboard didn't make the hard disk any bigger, or the video card any faster, or the optical drive capable of reading/writing more formats. It is really apples and oranges to compare a motherboard to a new machine, especially when you're talking about such a major redesign as the one found in the G5.