Guest guest Posted May 9, 2009 Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 Windows is as secure as the people that administrate it make it, including allowing/disallowing software to run or be installed. In fact, Windows has a finer-grained security model than Linux and most Unix mutations that allows someone to lock things down much more precisely. Unix/Linux of any sort without ACL's (Access Control Lists) has less precision for security, but it is simpler to understand for most. If you allow something like a web browser to run on a mission critical computer, that has any way to access any computers that get pages from the outside world, you're vulnerable to some extent, regardless of the type of OS, and you should be taken out back and shot, because the weakest link is almost always client software, and unless all client software is run in a situation where it can only access its own directories that have no critical data, you've got some measurable amount of attack surface to exploit: again, this doesn't matter what sort of OS it is. If, however, you close down every unnecessary port and service, and you don't allow users to use anything but the required applications, any of the above mentioned OS's can be used quite reliably, but none of those above are certified for situations where human lives are on the line, and without getting specialized extensions or mutations of the above OS's, none of them are truly real-time, and none of those mentioned are truly hard real-time OS's that should be used in such things as avionics and controlling critical things in nuclear power plants. > >><snip> > > > >> Maybe the FAA should have looked at each airport tower and system having > >> an independent intranet with no outside connections. That would increase > >> local efficiency without compromising security. Powerplants should just go > >> back to analog monitoring systems with actual people controlling the > >> machines > >> to adjust power. Sure this might mean a few second delay in reaction time, > >> but what would be far superior to having a hacker get in and completely > >> destroy the system and equipment. > >> > > > > Hackers may very readily scramble the software from a distance, and cause > > bad commands to be followed by those using them, but (at least for FAA > > computers) you won't be able to destroy hardware that way. If the power > > With many systems it takes a long time to find the critical hole in > the network, not " readily " . > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted May 9, 2009 Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 Computers generally are as secure as their administrators. Most of what I said was about older versions of Windows, but I am not sure about Vista and Windows Seven. Personally Windows is not quite my preferred cup of tea. I do need to get better track of SCADAs. I personally find it amusing in the iTunes software EULA that it says something along the lines of " you shall not use this software in the development of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, or missile systems. " Bring on the OS holy war. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted May 9, 2009 Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 The biggest problem with older versions of Windows (I won't speak of the 9x kernels, as they were always consumer-level with no aspersions to having security, at least if you developed for them, as you'd know that all things for security were stubs for Win32 API compatibility only) wasn't Windows design itself, as for the most part, Windows (NT) was designed quite securely: the problem arises in that Microsoft didn't force developers to follow all the guidelines while developing software, and allowed applications to do administrative things without requiring the user to change modes, and, the worst one, was that of providing a default Administrator account, which most people used by default: in essence, the system defaults were set by drunken monkeys, but if you had the system setup properly with user accounts being where you allowed only the applications to run that you wanted to (don't allow execution of things like the registry editor!), and required that only an Administrator could install the software and make major configuration changes, things were actually very secure early on, by design. Now, that's not to say that there haven't been bugs that if you know about them, and run into them, that you wouldn't hit problems... but that's true of any sufficiently complex OS/system, too. > > Computers generally are as secure as their administrators. Most of > what I said was about older versions of Windows, but I am not sure > about Vista and Windows Seven. Personally Windows is not quite my > preferred cup of tea. > I do need to get better track of SCADAs. I personally find it amusing > in the iTunes software EULA that it says something along the lines of > " you shall not use this software in the development of chemical, > biological, or nuclear weapons, or missile systems. " > Bring on the OS holy war. > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted May 9, 2009 Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 I prefer OSX because: 1) While I have had flash drives infected at school, PC stuff in general will not execute unless I use WINE or Virtual PC. 2) I like having terminal access to the core unix, including root, but also having a smooth GUI interface. 3) Experience on it. 4) Interface in my opinion is smoother and more efficient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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