[plug] Gold !

James Devenish devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au
Fri Dec 26 10:53:40 WST 2003


In message <Pine.LNX.4.58.0312261000110.22251 at ob>
on Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 10:07:12AM +0800, Mike Holland wrote:
> What can we tell the poor windows users?
> Is it enough to enable the firewall before connecting, and then run
> Update before running MS-IE ?

Does Windows Update use IE? (And does it run client-side scripts?)

> On Thu, 25 Dec 2003, James Devenish wrote:
> except that the threats have changed. Ten years ago,

Ten years ago, people were well aware of computer viruses (though worms
that propagated via the Internet were not a mainstream consumer
concern). I have heard that I made remarks about the Internet in primary
school, so there must have been some general consumer awareness of
something called the Internet, and presumably that means there was
consumer access in North America. But I wonder about exploits that would
have been possible via BBS systems. As far as I recall, BBSs were
reputed for spreading a number of worms and viruses. Computers were
surely doing disk sharing back in those days, too. Do we remember
whether Windows would have exposed people's hard drive contents over
whatever modem protocols were in use in those days? (I don't :)

Aside: does anyone know if Microsoft released an OS in 1992 or 1993? I'm
sure some neighbours bought a new Intel-based PC with a "new" Microsoft
operating system (something that was more like Windows 95 than Windows
3.1). Perhaps I was just hallucinating?

> most desktop unix boxes probably had less security (due to bad setup)
> than XP has now. But they didnt need it.

1/ Would it really be true that they didn't need it? (I just have to
take your word for it.) Or do you mean they didn't need it because
attacks were unlikely to be targeting UNIX architectures and no one
connected outside their local networks?

2/ With Windows home PCs, one can imagine that people had all their
personal work on the computer, without backup, and many of them with
modem dialups. In comparison, I would have thought that a fair number of
UNIX workstations would have been backed up institutionally.

3/ You say "desktop UNIX boxes...less security". In what way? E.g. one
can imagine problems such as remote code execution, information leakage,
client bugs, unwarranted authentication, etc. Are you saying that XP
doesn't provides those methods of ingress (I was under the impression
that such avenues intrusion into XP received a high profile this year).
I thoroughly believe that the default configuration of many UNIX
workstations would have been bad, but I'm not sure how that absolves
Windows.





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