Penetration Testing mailing list archives
Re: XPSP2 compatability
From: Jophn Deo <JophnDeo () Phreaker net>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 09:34:12 +0100
Sp2 hasn't been faling from the sky on a average rainy day. An abundance of reading material was avaible to the developer community maintaining their apps for the ms platform, in this case xp. A lot off software,packages , ports or whatever such as ethereal how good and impressive they might be , are still maintained by by volunteers who besides their regular jobs ( perhaps at MS who knows) , maintain and update the above described. Nothing wrong with that. However very often i see some maintainer making apologies on the website stating , haven't got the time, so this , that, isn't fixed, I have installed and tested more than 30 linux kernels upto FreeBSDand OpenBSD unixes.All had their pro's and cons.A pc with linux installed on it isn't more secure than a raw xp box with sp2 on it.
In my opinion security strongly depends on the skills and willingness of the end-user and the goal he/she has in mind.It allso depends on wether you only surf the net and send an occasional e-mail to some friends or you want to explore p2p , play online games, participate in forums, rip some shoutcast stations , make your own dolby 5.1/7.1 dvd's (taking some risk by using some obscure programs) and so on. People who have sniffed around in the kitchen of the open sourcecommunity , know that its hard to implement for eg noexec memory pages , etc while still maintaining continuity and giving the end-user the opportunity of using gui's isn't very trivial.It's to ordinaire giving MS the blame alone, compatibillity has some benefits from alertness of its maintainers allso.As a (private) desktop MS has besides Mac OsX no real compettitors.The true power of linux, *BSD ,Open/Bought Source is the total cost of ownership.No expensive licence fees alone that exeed the cost of all hardware.OpenBSD can become a superb firewall on a i386 box , when installed and maintained by some skilled hands , and compete with far more expensive hardware solutions.Adamantix a debian based
ultra secure linux , can make your server a tough nutt to crack. Yet don't wine if you can't mux your wav's into ac3's on it.I fully agree with some of the posters who said it all depends on the purpose.
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Current thread:
- RE: XPSP2 compatability, (continued)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Chris Fussell (Aug 20)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Joe Smith (Aug 19)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Yonatan Bokovza (Aug 19)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Monroe, Bruce (Aug 19)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability DeGennaro, Gregory (Aug 20)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Todd Towles (Aug 20)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Joe Smith (Aug 22)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Chris Brenton (Aug 22)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Joe Smith (Aug 22)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability OBrien, Brennan (Aug 20)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Kevin Sheldrake (Aug 21)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Jophn Deo (Aug 22)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Max (Aug 24)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Kevin Sheldrake (Aug 21)
- RE: XPSP2 compatability Wozny, Scott (US - New York) (Aug 20)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Kevin Sheldrake (Aug 21)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Michael Richardson (Aug 24)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Kevin Sheldrake (Aug 24)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Michael Richardson (Aug 24)
- Re: XPSP2 compatability Kevin Sheldrake (Aug 21)