[plug] Linux virusability on the desktop

[Leon Brooks]

On Tuesday 23 April 2002 15:33, Brad Hill wrote:
> The main advantages of moving to linux are immunities to viruses, and the
> main disadvantages are lack of support for various applications.  What you
> must realise is that these are essentially one and the same.  If (or when)
> the market realizes there's good reason to support a linux environment and
> produce nice stable applications for users to run, and everyone starts to
> move across to Linux, you'll also get more people writing viruses
> specifically for linux.

And email clients stupid enough to run them, and a MIME system dyslexic enough 
to provoke that, and a web browser and server, each which more-or-less has 
kernel access.

I think when it comes down to it, the coding and care standards of Linux will 
have to erode a fair bit before it becomes really virus-viable. Viruses have 
in a way missed their window of opportunity, whereas with MS-DOS (even with 
those funny display extensions) they've well and truly got a foot in the 
door. VMS had decent security, and as usual Microsoft botched it when they 
per^H^H^Hconverted it to Windows NT so that NT starts with an assumption of 
total insecurity, the tries to layer security in on top of that. Linux has 
had things like user-awareness built in from Day One.

Cheers; Leon