Sabrina has bought a new Amiga!

[Psy]

What I mean is, most people who praise UNIX/Linux security fail to mention that only the system is safe. If you get a rouge program on your system (through an ActiveX control, a bug in JavaVM, or a virus through an e-mail client), than you can kiss all your personal files goodbye. The system files are secured, nothing in your user account is.

You know that if a hacker gains access to system files they can do far more damage then if they get access to data files.  I know of some Windows users that due to the weakness of Windows security of devices they got huge longdistance bills via hackers taking control of their regular modem via their hispeed internet connection.

System Restore, backups, and journaled filesystems can only be so effective.

Backups are 100% effective they just take time to restore the system but if you regularly backup you'll always be fine.  

My Dad use to work for AT&T and their solution was automated daily backup and these protected aginst system&hardware failure plus hacker attacks. Even when a employee silinced a alarm to a bad rectifier that caused the entire AT&T network to come crashing down, the backups where there to bring the system back.  The only time I heard AT&T backup system failed was when a harddrive went through a security xray machine when it was UPSed to the site with the down eqipment.  

No offense, but I wish people would stop thinking in terms of servers. Servers are still very much purpose-built machines made and maintained by people who know what they are doing, and where most tools and apps are designed for throughput, and thus must be installed at a low level and trusted to not do stupid things to the system. Home users are in a situation where they often have to install software they can't fully trust, they can sacrifice a lot of performance for ease of use, apps and tools rarely need low-level access (except maybe for games), and the machines are not really designed to work 24/7, either for technical or economical reasons.

Yes but most home users don't think about security until it is too late.  Most home users don't even backup and until users learn the basics of being sys admins there is no point kicking them into *nix as even if today you got more people to use *nix odds are most users will only run under root and leave *nix open for all kinds of attacks.

[Panthro]

WOW i BET hes back writing a comic on how dumb this thread is!!  well lets see how long before this becomes a MOS Vs Amiga Vs Windows Vs Linux Vs BeOs Vs QNX Vs RiscOs Vs  :pissed: who cares....... I'm here because I like Amiga :-D

[Floid]

Now I'm sorry I discarded my own ramble in this thread (dunno if the Mac was 'Too Good,' but if you look at their track record in the crunch time, they had sub-Commodore levels of innovation, while cranking out twice as many "AmigaJr" equivalents, before necessarily alienating everyone with the move to PPC)...

But AT&T's backup system would've worked, of course, because someone paid a lot of attention to ensuring things like billing record types were compatible among versions.  Good integrity, like good security, comes by design.

(Re: Linux; conceivably you could 'su' to an 'Internet Zone' user for all your browsing, though that creates some other issues if you want to access the X server...  The Amiga 'style' has a sort of advantage there, since some sort of hierarchial jailing -- cross assigns with ACLs -- might work.)

[Varthall]

I'm surprised to see how this thread has evolved, changed and splitted! It would be cool if in the next month's strips Sabrina would read and comment these posts

Varthall