Re: Card Reader

Floyd Davidson wrote:
> As he said, it is /theoretically/ possible...  but note that the
> theory requires that a user not just be ignorant, but to also
> intentionally make an effort to assist.

Nonsense. I use some garden-variety exploit to get my
code running as the user; muck with his path so "sudo"
runs my script, which gives me root.

For a virus, getting root/admin on either Linux or Windows
is neither really hard nor really necessary. How it can get
user access; what it can do with user access; how it may
move up to privileged access: these are fundamentally the
same on Windows and Linux.


> Which is to say, those who think Unix could ever have the
> problems that Windows does with security, should read not only
> more, but *deeper*.  Get past the headlines, the FUD, and find
> out what the facts are.

Despite the flame-wars, Unix and MS-Windows (NT or better)
have quite similar security measures. At the O.S. level,
the biggest difference is NT's pervasive use of
access-control lists and security descriptors. The Unix
world has been slowly embracing ACL's, but Linux
distributions are still permission-bit based.

On the other hand, Microsoft has shipped software with
truly disastrous default settings. It's not a fundamental
flaw in the O.S., and they're getting better, slowly. They
stopped running e-mail attachments by default, but last
time I checked their systems still installed with CD-ROM
autoplay enabled.


[...]
> The fundamental differences are huge.

They're really, really, not.

> Small things that most
> people simply do not understand the significance of make all the
> difference.  For example, the GUI system for Windows is built
> into the kernel, which was necessary to provide adequate speed.
> That is *inherently* the wrong thing to do.

In both Linux and MS-Win, parts of the GUI system run
privileged, parts run non-privileged. Both OS's are designed
for platforms that intrinsically allow hardware drivers to
take over the system.



--
--Bryan
.

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