Have you had enough with cleaning up your Windows OS after some security exploit?
Tired of hearing gripes from your users, proclaiming that all they did was surf what they thought was a perfectly innocent Web site before their PC crashed and burned?
So why can’t Microsoft make a more secure version of Windows to protect us all from these situations?
Give them points for trying: At least Vista and IE v7 attempt to lock things down more than what was possible with XP, something that’s finding lots of appeal with IT managers who are considering these upgrades.
But still. Look at what Microsoft did with Vista’s firewall. The firewall available on XP (and only with Service Pack 2) didn’t block outbound connections, which made it easier for the bad guys to turn your PC into a spam-creating zombie.
Vista includes this ability, but it’s so difficult to set up and too obscure to configure that you’re still better off with a third-party firewall.
Just think of the entire software infrastructure Microsoft could eliminate overnight if Windows were more resilient. Anti-spyware, antivirus, personal firewall, anti-phishing tools would all be unnecessary. Nice to dream about, even for just a moment.
Instead, the harsh reality is that corporate IT managers have had to develop elaborate schemes for locking down their Windows desktops, eliminating security weaknesses and curtailing numerous options that are part of the Windows OS.
Too bad there isn’t a more secure desktop OS readily available.
Actually, I was just playing. I can think of two secure desktop Operating System’s right off the top of my head:
- Fedora OS (Linux-based)
- Macintosh OS X (based on FreeBSD UNIX)
Too bad that most corporate IT shops can’t use them for their bread-and-butter applications. One day my friends, one day.
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If you want security and stability, wouldn’t Debian be the first distribution to look at? The stable version is not exactly feature-laden, but nothing ever crashes, and nothing ever breaks.
Hi Jason.
Debian is nice, so is Ubuntu but I prefer Fedora and also Slackware.
As for nothing breaking on your Debian install, let me have at it for a while, I’m sure I can crash something
As far as Fedora-based GNU/Linux operating systems, why not go 100% Free Software? BLAG is working on their Fedora 7 spin, and it looks nice.
I’d encourage everyone to test the FC7 beta version of BLAG and perform bug tests, feature requests, etc.
Mac OS X is not based on FreeBSD, and legally you can not call FreeBSD UNIX. Mac OS X is based on Mach microkernel, BSD subsystem is in the same memory space as the kernel handling TCP/IP stack, basic security measures (such as user id), POSIX API, and all kinds of other goodies. Anyway, FreeBSD is a big part of it but it is not based on FreeBSD.
There are a number of companies deploying OS X and Linux clients while whatever old proprietary applications are being virtualized in VMware, Parallels, or Xen. It is also popular to stick VMware Server (which is free) on the server and virtualize a whole Windows Server with Exchange.
Jason Cole, Debian offers no support for any of the commercial software that is being deployed in the real server environment leaving it with only basic router/firewall functionality. Perhaps Ubuntu as a desktop but then again an IT manager would want something more stable.
Anyway, sorry for going all nerdy on you.
@Dylan: I am perfectly happy with my Fedora and Slackware installs but thank you for the suggestions.
I’m sure some of my readers might be interested in your suggestions.
@Vitaliy: I would like to direct your attention to the following link on the Apple website:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/
You will see multiple mentions of FreeBSD, FreeBSD services and “BSD environment that underlies Mac OS X.”
I won’t get into the legalities of what you can and can not call UNIX. Someone else will need to chime in on that one.
@Sean: There are a number of mentions of FreeBSD because they use a lot of the code in the kernel space. As stated before for things like TCP/IP stack and file system. Basically when they were developing OS X everything that was slow under the Mach microkernel was replaced with BSD code instead. Check out this link for more details on the implementation.
BSD can not be legally called UNIX because of the lawsuits Unix System Laboratories that took place in 1994. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
OS X also implements a lot of neat stuff from OpenBSD, just like GNU/Linux and Solaris do. They do a lot of code interchange.
@Vitaliy: Apple mentions FreeBSD because some parts of the OS X code are based on it. Even you admit that in your comment.
If any program has even a little part of something else, it’s technically based on that. At least that’s how I see it.
Even WordPress itself was originally a fork from b2, so it’s safe to say WordPress was based on b2.
Good points all except the point about Anti-Phishing tools not being necessary with a more secure OS. The only way to really effective way to defeat Phishing schemes is to educate users.