Student Project Market Research

[oz]

I am getting some Funny results.
eg. People contradicting each other.

Maybe I've misunderstood your comment above, but I can understand people contradicting each other in a poll, but it seems like there would be more of a problem if they were contradicting themselves.

[RobinVossen]

Just one person contradicted himself till now.
But seems like 50/50 would want better security products for Linux systems. I thought that was amusing.

[jayd512]

But seems like 50/50 would want better security products for Linux systems.

That sounds about right.
Looking past posts here, and at other forums, it seems that about half of all Linux users seem to think the Linux is secure enough as is.

[elija]

Maybe better means easier to manage rather than stronger. Although stronger never hurts when it comes to security.

[RobinVossen]

Well I highly doubt Linux is secure enough (if you take vanilla).
Just due to the fact a lot of people say it's secure enough.

eg. you can fairly easily write malware that harvests passwords from a home folder. And read history files in a smart way hoping to see something like:

cd ~/vids
mplayer *
vim /usr/bin/cloc
crawl-tiles
cd src
ls
cd t
ls
gedit *.c
ls
cd ..
su
su
ls
clear
ls
exit
su
D@kAalT
su
exit

Notice the typed password in the history where the user didn't pay attention and pressed enter twice. (Yes this happens a lot).

And besides that argument I would like to Quote Linus yet once more.

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Btw, and you may not like this, since you are so focused on security, one
reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think
it glorifies – and thus encourages – the wrong behavior.

It makes “heroes” out of security people, as if the people who don’t just
fix normal bugs aren’t as important.

In fact, all the boring normal bugs are _way_ more important, just because
there’s a lot more of them. I don’t think some spectacular security hole
should be glorified or cared about as being any more “special” than a
random spectacular crash due to bad locking.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can’t
stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

To me, security is important. But it’s no less important than everything
*else* that is also important!

[atreyu]

done.

i tried to keep my contradictions to a minimum.

[RobinVossen]

Thanks =)
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