10.14.09
Have Banks Just Become Biggest Advocates of GNU/Linux?
Summary: Transactions with Windows lead to disasters, which in turn advance GNU/Linux on the desktop
MANY RECENT articles (at least half a dozen) were written about a recommendation from the Australian police, which advised peers to use GNU/Linux for online banking. This was followed by a column from the Washington Post, which sent waves across the Web. Several other articles were then published to suggest that people use a Live CD or an additional partition for their banking purposes, unless they already use the platform or might move to it on a full-time basis.
The Register now has this report
A Pennsylvania organization that helps develop affordable housing learned a painful lesson about the hazards of online banking using the Windows operating system when a notorious trojan siphoned almost $480,000 from its account.
Microsoft has been working quite a lot with banks recently [1, 2]. Alas, banks not only abandon Microsoft but unintentionally they also lead to GNU/Linux being advocated for desktop use. █
NotZed said,
October 14, 2009 at 10:32 pm
It must be noted that the NSW police were suggesting using a live CD-ROM explicitly since nothing can be stored locally. It wasn’t specifically because GNU/Linux is safer, although that of course helps.
Also, the point was that enforcing particular software requirements would be nonsensical in a multi-platform world.