full-disclosure - What is wrong with schools these days?

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Message-ID: <20060427091319.86f7a479.nick@nickwithers.com>
Date: Thu Apr 27 00:13:38 2006
From: nick at nickwithers.com (Nick Withers)
Subject: What is wrong with schools these days?

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:56:26 -0500
"John Lightfoot" <jlightfoot@...il.com> wrote:

> Peter Besenbruch wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> Clueless people will always be with us. No OS is going to keep them safe,
> but some may do a better job than others. You seem successful in managing
> Windows boxes, but my experience is the opposite. Those daughters who kept
> getting their computer infected? They never were told the root password. It
> also meant a lot that they couldn't just double click something and have it
> run. Such a simple difference in design can mean the world.
> </snip>
> 
> I don't see why you think Linux is any better at this.  If you gave those
> same daughters a fully patched Windows XP box, turned on automatic updates,
> and gave them accounts that were only in the Users group (i.e. not
> administrators), their chance of getting infected would be zero, too.

I don't think your chances of getting infected are ever "zero".
Good old "nothing's ever 100% secure"...

I've seen quite a few applications that (at least claim) to
require adminstrative privileges. This may be a design flaw in
those applications, or perhaps there's an underlying problem in
Windows' user privileges seperation, or some such. In short,
I've found it far less painful to run as a restricted user (I
don't mean a "Power User" user either - these are just users
who haven't made themselves administrators yet) on UNIX-like
systems than on Windows.

-- 
Nick Withers
email: nick@...kwithers.com
Web: http://www.nickwithers.com
Mobile: +61 414 397 446