You dont think there is a linux virus? Linux is even less secure than Windows. I couldnt even name all the viruses that affect linux, the amount is ridiculous.
You are right that there are Linux viruses, even though I stated otherwise beforehand. However, they are all very old and there haven't been any like them for a long time. That, or they target Red Hat, which is probably one of the least secure distributions out there. Check out Debian's track record and you will see that it is significantly better.
Running Linux or BSD, I have never encountered anything like Stammer or Nachi. In fact, I've never ran into any security problems at all with my *nix boxen. I can't say that for the 2k/XP/2003 boxen I work on.
Also, in the quote you gave after your original post, you outline many of the reasons why Linux is significantly more secure than Windows. However, the final point is not relevant in the server world, where Apache on Linux makes up about 60% of the web server market.
OSX will become vulnerable as script junkies continue working. Windows XP was untouchable for the first few months it was out, and is still pretty strong with security, My business fell over from nachi but not one XP machine was afflicted.
Mac OS X has been out for fifteen years in one form or another and as of yet, there has not been a single virus for it in the wild. NT is slightly younger and the number of viruses numbers in the hundreds of thousands. This is, of course, ignoring the many viruses that were written for Windows 9x.
I have a few OSX machines here and i had to re install OSX on one of them because it was CRASHING.
I shall then provide you with a counterexample. I have had this laptop for nearly a year and it has been running the latest versions of Mac OS X. It has only crashed four times for reasons I couldn't attribute to my own hacking of the OS.
Regardless, instability is not directly related to security. Most of the time, instability on Mac OS X is related to users modding the system. If you don't install crap that changes out core parts of the OS, you're fine.
Im running a solid checkpoint firewall at my work, but a firewall isnt a standard user OS so i dont see what the heck that has to do with your ordinary windows, mac, or linux user.
It doesn't. You said that computers were all about hardware. I was stating that hardware is only important in that it provides enough resources for good software to do its job effectively.
Unix is unstable
*ahem*
[khristine:~] wlewis% uptime
7:46PM up 42 days, 20:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.05, 0.00
That is only because I had an outage and this server isn't important enough to me to have a UPS.
and lacks proprietary components.
How is that a good thing? Security through obscurity?
I could go on all day.
As can I.
every system/OS is flawed somehow or another.
Agreed. Some, however, are more flawed than others.
Maybe you just need more experience to start seeing this stuff
Attack my points, not me.
