The difference is, im not saying anything sucks, what I am saying is that for me, I have more freedom to do what I want to do with linux then M$, and from a business standpoint, where the dollar is the bottom line, it makes more sense to replace costly M$ license fee's with opensource software whenever possible.
Windows is a nice windows manager, and yes, most people are comfortable with it. Myself, I like to do things in the most efficient manner, be it console or windowed. when I need window managing and heavy console use I switch to Rat Poison as a window manager, but, as I am no longer in the IT arena, i use gnome because my wife likes it and was an easy switch for her when her 98 box died and had to rely on my laptop.
To say linux is no more secure then windows just not a target of the script kiddies is disingenuous, just take the results of the hackers bowl, where the finest system cracks gather to win money.
It's the most anticipated matchup in the hacker world: Linux versus Mac OS X versus Vista. Who will get hacked first?
That's what organizers of the CanSecWest security conference hope to discover this week as they give show attendees a shot at hacking into the three laptops they've put on display here in Vancouver.
The catch? They have to use a brand-new 'zero day' attack that nobody has seen before. The prize? US$20,000, plus you get to keep the laptop.
Show organizers are calling the contest PWN 2 OWN. Pwn (which rhymes with own) is a hacker term meaning to take control of a computer.
$20,000 may sound like a lot of money, but show attendees say that top-quality computer attack code could easily fetch that much, either from the security vendors like iDefense or Tipping Point who purchase this type of software, or from one of the three-letter U.S. government agencies said to be in the market for this type of code as well.
Charlie Miller, best known as one of the Independent Security Evaluators researchers who first hacked the iPhone last year, said he's participating, not for the cash prize, but for the thrill of seeing whether or not he can be first to hack one of the computers. "For me it's the Super Bowl of security research," he said. "I'm a competitive guy."
By late Wednesday -- the first day of the contest, nobody had even tried to hack the three laptops. This wasn't exactly a surprise to the contest's organizers because on day one attackers were only allowed to use network-based attacks that involved no user interaction. Those type of attacks are extremely rare these days.
Miller said that he will drop his exploit code on the MacBook Air Thursday, once the rules relax a bit and the hackers are allowed to try attacks that require user action such as visiting a malicious Web site or opening an e-mail.
There is a downside to waiting until Thursday, however. The prize money drops in half each day. If no one has claimed the laptops by Friday, the prize bottoms out at $5,000 and organizers will start installing non-standard software on the machines to see if they can be compromised through programs such as Skype.
Last year's contest generated a lot of attention, but it featured only one laptop: a MacBook Pro. It was won by researcher Dino Dai Zovi, who wasn't at the conference, but asked a friend to run his attack on the machine. Dai Zovi showed up in person at CanSecWest this year, however, making him another prime candidate to win the prize.
With three laptops to chose from, this year, the 2008 contest is a bit of a horse race.
"It will be interesting to see which one goes first," said Aaron Portnoy, a researcher with TippingPoint, the company that has put up the prize money. "We've tried really hard to make sure the attack surface is the same on all of them."
and the results?
After a week full of Red Bulls, Fruit by the Foot and dreams of In-N-Out, the mighty Sony VAIO loaded with Linux stood as the only machine unhacked by the end of the PWN 2 OWN hacking contest at CanSecWest. As you're well aware by now, the MacBook Air on display was seized in two minutes by the presumably well prepared Charlie Miller, and after two full days of work, Shane Macaulay and a few of his 1337 associates managed to crack the Vista rig on Friday. Reportedly, Shane and his pals weren't expecting to do battle with the extra protected SP1 version of Vista, and while the exact loophole won't be divulged, we are told that it was a cross-platform bug that "took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista's security." In the end, it was reported that some folks on hand had discovered bugs in the Linux OS, but many of them "didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest."
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Topic: Linux Sucks. Java sucks. I'm a Microsoft guy again! (Read 148335 times)