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    Viruses: Linux vs windows (article)

    Discussion in 'Linux Compatibility and Software' started by wearetheborg, Jun 4, 2009.

  1. wearetheborg

    wearetheborg Notebook Virtuoso

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    wearetheborg, Jun 4, 2009
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  2. Pitabred

    Pitabred Linux geek con rat flail!

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    That article is coming on 6 years old. The first version of Ubuntu wasn't even released then (it was a year after that article was written). Just to make sure things stay in perspective... lots of facts may have changed in the interim. And the author is obviously biased toward Windows. Most of the comments of how damning 14,000 infections on Linux could be, while completely ignoring that there were orders of magnitude more Windows machines more infected and NOT causing the devastation he theorized. Not understanding the difference between the active code that Outlook used to execute versus the HTML rendering that almost all email clients do, and then the "I can't be the only person who logged in as root and stayed this way" comment... this article is completely baseless FUD from a Microsoft apologist who doesn't actually understand the technology.
     
    Pitabred, Jun 4, 2009
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  3. Gintoki

    Gintoki Notebook Prophet

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    Yeah, what Pitabred said. This is a face full of FUD.
     
    Gintoki, Jun 4, 2009
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  4. wearetheborg

    wearetheborg Notebook Virtuoso

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    Can you elaborate on that ? Why would outlook run active code when other email clients do not ??
     
    wearetheborg, Jun 4, 2009
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  5. zephyrus17

    zephyrus17 Notebook Deity

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    I would guess for securtiy reasons on the other clients' part?
     
    zephyrus17, Jun 4, 2009
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  6. Pitabred

    Pitabred Linux geek con rat flail!

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    Because Microsoft is stupid? (another link to stupidity) They allowed Outlook to run VBS and other scripts automatically to make things more user-friendly and featureful, but it just ended up as a huge hole for viruses to infect. Same thing with ActiveX. Other email clients never ran ActiveX in HTML mails, Outlook did for a number of years. If people disabled the warnings because they were annoying (UAC, anyone?) they were even more at risk.
     
    Pitabred, Jun 4, 2009
    #6