The reason spam is continually sent is that enough people respond to the spam to make it worthwhile. The reason botnets exist is that enough people click on the link that downloads the dodgy file to make it worthwhile.

GNU/Linux is a great operating system but I somehow doubt that it is user proof. Look at the way Ubuntu uses sudo. All a malware author needs to do is a bit of social engineering on the user to get them to execute the file, add a user cron job to see if sudo has been used recently and wait to install with super user privileges. With regular updates, the wait shouldn’t be too long. They could simply roll a deb or rpm with added malware for a coveted piece of software that is not available in the OS repositories. They could target a mirror, or even the main repository for an OS.

The advantage most GNU/Linux distros have over Windows is that updates update the whole system and little software is proprietary, so you are unlikely to have an unpatched publicly know exploit sitting around for long.

Windows proponents, at least in the sjvn comments, often seem to point to the number of security holes fixed in open source software as a measure that the software is flakey. It still surprises me that they do this: a bug is found in firefox, bam a security fix is out and 24-48 hours later all the distros have it; a bug is found in IE, bam 8 months later it gets a patch maybe. Collecting together bug fixes and not publishing the details of all of them is not a measure of a more secure system.

Anyway, back at the point. Apache has two modes of operation, threaded and child processes. The threaded model seems a little more limited and thus things like php have required the child process approach (if this is no longer the case I’d like to know). This makes it somewhat easier for an attacker to bring down a system with a DOS attack. Maybe we should be looking at apache and asking what can be done to improve it’s resilience against DOS attacks. I have no doubt that this is already being done (this is open source software after all) and we can probably all list some of the available counter-measures.

Ideally, everyone would just switch to a desktop Linux or a Mac. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

It is strange that people treat this as an outlandish idea, as if M$’s monopoly were based on merit when the author knows better. Every major PC maker has been selling GNU/Linux computers for years and they’ve all done well with them. Massive and expensive management of retail, OEM, education and government and perception are required to maintain the M$ monopoly but Vista really was the end of them. We all know it. Even Dvorak uses GNU/Linux now. I’ve been using GNU/Linux exclusively at home for the last eight years or so. My whole family uses it, starting at age 3. There’s not much we miss out on besides problems. Mine is a nearly universal experience. People in the tech press need to quit pretending GNU/Linux is something rare, strange, difficult or otherwise outlandish.

It is, indeed time to put the full burden of Windows use on it’s users. There’s no need for new complicated and expensive scanning of Windows machines. All ISPs already know which of their clients are infected, and have booted them in the past. They need to do this again. A problem is that ISPs like Cox and Comcast have shown bad faith towards P2P and other forms of sharing. Regulators will have to be watchful to make sure that booting infected machine programs are not abused this way. M$ and Windows users have all smugly pushed IE and the Windows only web on the world. It is only fitting that they be banished based on obvious harm. This kind of booting could not have happened to a nicer company.