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Journal CleverNickName's Journal: Seriously. Best. Email. EVAR. 52

Journal by CleverNickName

Honestly, I can't make this shit up.

From: "Michael Bedford"
To: "Wil Wheaton"

Date: Today 20:00:06

Welcome to WIL WHEATON dot NET.
Fair and Balanced.

Fair and balanced is not what you are. The real host of Screen Savers never busted on Windows like you have. I agree Linux has its place but man you just lost fan when you busted harsh on Windows. You should realize people write viruses for fame and what OS is the best to get fame on is Windows. You should only hope that Linux doesn't become the main OS of choice for the desktop someday because it will be attacked in the same way. All I got to say is open your mind man but you were really negative on that show towards others and too pro Linux. If you were the permanent host I'd stop watching that show fairly quickly.

A fan you lost,
Mike

Let's go to the Big Board, shall we?

FUD: 1
Sanity: 0

We'll be back after this message.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Seriously. Best. Email. EVAR. More

Seriously. Best. Email. EVAR.

Comments Filter:
  • Oh man, Wil, I totally agree with you. That was one of the few episodes of Screen Savers I watched and you gave Windows the ripping it deserved. The regulars, from what I can tell, are closet Windows advocates -- and that's why I tend not to watch.
  • When I say.... "HUH?"

    Seriously, what was this guy smoking, and can I have some?

  • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Surak ( 18578 ) * <surakNO@SPAMmailblocks.com> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @12:08AM (#6771030) Homepage Journal
    I have not seen the SS segment in question, mostly because Comcast doesn't carry the channel in question, at least not in my area. The bastards.

    Anyways, the guy has a valid point about viruses...yes, if Linux becomes more and more common on the desktop, virus authors will target it.

    However, it's much harder to write a Linux virus than a Windows virus. The default mode of Linux is to NOT run in superuser mode, which is very different than the default mode of Windows. Most people running WIndows XP are running with administrator permissions all the time. Most people running Linux aren't.

    True viruses, not e-mail trojans, can target Linux. Mostly by attacking system services that are running as root. Fortunately, more and more daemon writers are writing their stuff so it does NOT have root permissions. sendmail likes to run as root, but postfix doesn't. BIND likes to run as root, but djbdns doesn't. Desktop users are advised to run little or no services. For instance, most of the time I only run sshd on my box, so anyone targetting my box will have to target OpenSSH. But I keep my OpenSSH patched up to current levels thanks to Gentoo and Portage, so targetting sshd on my box is going to be QUITE the task. Especially given that OpenSSH is written with security in mind in the first place. :)

    But anyways, I digress... Linux might be harder for virus, trojan and worm authors to target, but it's not impossible, and as Linux becomes more and more successful, more and more attacks on it will occur. This will result in some security issues....but the good news is that open source authors are generally quick with fixes and patches unlike Microsoft. And this will only strengthen open source software, because it will expose more and more vulnerabilities which is what is needed to get them fixed.

    Other than that, the guy is basically on crack, though. :)

    • He has a point, but the biggest reason people target Windows for viruses is that there's a computing monoculture out there. If many fewer people used Windows, there'd be fewer obvious virus and worm targets, so the ones that made it out would have far less impact.

      Also, Linux programs are far more reluctant to run code that come from random places on the net than Windows programs are. That also makes Linux a harder virus target.

      • Um, yeah, that's basically what I said.... ;)

      • the biggest reason people target Windows for viruses is that there's a computing monoculture out there

        I'm not a linux zealot. In fact, most of the machines I own run some flavor of windows. I agree that the "monoculture" is the big problem and MS created it. There are those that would argue that Linux would have the same problems if it were on the majority of desktops, but I don't see it. These people are thinking of Linux as if it were a direct Windows substitution - monopolies and all - , but Linux

        • I agree with you, but when having conversations with seemingly completely unreasonable people, I prefer the most defensible possible assertion. The most defensible and obviously true assertion is that if we had a greater variety of OSes connected to the Internet, it would be much less likely that any given worm would have a huge impact.

          Saying essentially the Linux, in and of itself, is a very diverse gene pool is true, but requires more thought and will be more difficult to convince an unreasonable person

    • Easier I'd say...

      I actually got a linux virus. The root/user barrier is not as helpful as it'd sound. If you need to get something done and a program says you need to be root, you rerun it with sudo. :)

      If there hadn't have been a bug in the virus that ate up all my pid space I would not have noticed it was there at all.

      Here's the real kicker. Under linux, I was sorta stuck. They don't make a norton anti-virus for linux. I had to write the removal tool myself. The fix took around 7 hours... it

      • Linux.RST is an ELF executable virus. The only way you could have gotten that is in an executable file that you downloaded and executed. The only way it could have infected everything in /bin is if you did a sudo.

        So the real question is, what Linux binaries were you downloading from questionable sources? And why were you running them as root? It sounds like you weren't taking reasonable precautions.

        I reccomend HPux. It's a really slick unix and a friend of mine even got helix gnome running under it.
        • Unless I'm mistaken, HP-UX only runs on HP RISC machines. And as an experienced Unix sysadmin, I can say that HP-UX isn't nearly as slick as AIX, which has really nice support for modern things like a journaling filesystem, a really slick logical volume manager, SMP, NUMA, etc. ;)

          I'm an hpux system admin and I can say, "What are you smoking?" hpux has a journaling file system (vxfs, Veritas journaling file system), a very good logical volume manager (same as AIX), SMP since forever. I don't know what NU
          • The Veritas filesystem and logical volume manager is a separate, proprietary product...it runs on Solaris also. JFS is native to AIX and, more importanly, has been open sourced by IBM.

            NUMA is non-uniform memory access. It's useful for clusters.
            • It's not a "separate" product in hpux. I'm sure HP has licensed software from many different sources to make it happen but when you get hpux, you get vxfs (also called JFS in hpux), and LVM built in. However you have to pay extra for what HP calls "Online JFS" which lets you change the size of filesystems on the fly without even unmounting the filesystem while it's being used.
        • 36 hours, and he still hasn't said what he dl'ed that fubar'ed his system.
          • 36 hours, and he still hasn't said what he dl'ed that fubar'ed his system.

            My guess: whatever it is, there is some embarrasment factor there. ;)

        • You just like smit(ty) Surak, admit it.
          • While I'll usually be the first to say that smitty sucks as bad Linuxconf*, I have to admit it's rather useful for quick administration tasks and I find myself using it more often than not. ;)

            * don't even get my started about that Red Hat written POS. ;)

        • Agreed, so lemme ask this. How many rpms have you installed where you didn't check the signature, and didn't check the pre/post install scripts?

          How many tarballs have you downloaded where you ran the ./configure && make && make install without even paying attention?

          If you said anything other than 0 get off your high horse... otherwise... wow. You work harder than I do.

          • First off, I highly doubt that you got infected binaries off of one of the major .RPM distribution sites. If you wanna know what I really think, I really think you downloaded some sort of warez off of Gnutella or Kazaa or something...perhaps VMware, perhaps a game such as Unreal Tournament 2003...

            Secondly, I use Gentoo. Admittedly, I don't pay THAT much attention to it as it compiles, but everything on my system has been, in fact, compiled from source, with the exception of my nVidia kernel driver (which
            • Actually where I got it was a neighboring machine... There was a 2.2.14 box in the hizzy -- not my problem. It got rooted and I had some ssh keys on there -- my problem. They used those keys to root my other boxen and spread the virus ... apparently just for fun.

              Heh... my bad. Actually, if they hadn't spread the virus I wouldn't have noticed they were in there at all. Pretty well behaved for script kiddies actually. All they were running was the virus. I really expected to see some IRC bots and thi

    • The default mode of Linux is to NOT run in superuser mode, which is very different than the default mode of Windows. Most people running WIndows XP are running with administrator permissions all the time. Most people running Linux aren't.

      It's more than that. XP Home Edition doesn't allow you to be a "Power User." You're either a "User" or an "Administrator." But a crapload of programs don't run unless you're at least a Power User. Therefore, everyone makes themselves an administrator.

      When I set up

  • Fair & Balanced (Score:1, Troll)

    by Phroggy ( 441 ) *
    You're probably about as Fair & Balanced as Al Franken, who is currently being sued by Fox News for using the term.

    • Re:Fair & Balanced (Score:3, Informative)

      by Satai ( 111172 ) *
      It got thrown out [cnn.com].
      • Damn, makes my .sig kind of irrelevant.

        Thanks for the link anyway. I'm glad to see that the judge has a sense of reality. But I'm not so sure that Fox didn't have a point: I see absolutely no parody involved in having Bill O'Reilly, Busy, Cheney and Ann Coulter surrounded by the words "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them."

        • The parody part is that after he says, "Lies and the lying liars that tell them," he then calls himself "Fair and balanced," which he is obviously not, due to the ad hominem attacks in the title.

          He is showing that Bill O', Busy, Cheney, and "Rimjob" Coulter are not fair and balanced by behaving like they do, only slightly more exaggerated. A parody.

          He did the same thing with "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot": He was attempting to illustrate the lack of decorum in our nation's political discourse. Definit
  • Truely, these people are idiots. I had a flamewar on the IS list a couple months back with a windows fan(atic). He said that Linux is jsut a susceptable to viruses as windows. It was completely ridiculous. The only machines ever hacked or infected were windows. To make it a thing where you stop being a fan because you disagree with someone is imature. What a luser.

    post more of those...it's funny
    • There are Linux [vnunet.com] viruses [oreillynet.com] and many hacks [vnunet.com] out there.

      Linux is not magic---like any other OS---it can be misconfigured and be vulnerable to attack.

      • That was a typo, I know there are linux viruses and hacks, that was supposed to say the only machines ever infected _here_ were windows. ;-)

    • It's interesting, I'm sure there must be plenty of "Windows fan(atic)s" like this guy out there, but I have yet to meet any of them personally. The most pro-Windows person I know is a sysadmin who freely admits he doesn't like Windows, but pushes it as a solution because that's what he knows and it keeps him employed. Everyone else I know is either pro-Mac, pro-Linux, or just flat out doesn't care what OS the computer is running as long as they can send email.
  • and especially when this stupid worm is outspamming the spammers as bandwidth goes, I would think people would be more pro-linux in the general public as a result. Silly me, trusting in logic...
  • Did you just say Patty LaBelle has a huge rack?
  • When did you notice the whole "EVAR" thing?
  • Was when that one dude "hax0r" emailed in a question about "How to install linux".

    Man Wil and whats-his-face went off on him for a few minutes, it was some funny shit
  • My Tivo's program description said something to the effect of "Star Trek alum Wil Wheaton hosts..." or some such. Maybe next time you host it'll say "author, actor, geek, Wil Wheaton hosts..."

    BTW, your server still hates me when I access from work. I promise to order a copy of Dancing Barefoot just as soon as I'm able to get through to wilwheaton.net!

    OBTW How come you didn't run for governor? It's the gubernatorial race that's sweeping the nation! (I just like saying the word "gubernatorial")
  • Interesting that, while one rarely posts their age when writing notes like this, it's not terribly difficult to tell the relative age of the writer.

    Mr. Bedford should realize as well that when a company with the financial depth of Microsoft releases a product, and charges for it as much as they do, it should work correctly in any number of ways, including the ability to run successfully on a network without being brought down by every 9-year-old who can run a bunch of scripts exploiting flaws in the operat
  • Gotta say Will, as big of a fan as I am, I have to agree with the guy.

    There's more than enough Linux Zealots in the world, Windows isn't nearly as bad as it's portrayed.

    And no this isn't flaimbait or trolling or anything but my opinion. I'm just sick of the Anti-Microsoft attitude. I run both, the Windows system is infinitely more useful to me. That's just how things go. "The right tool" as my Cobol teacher said.

  • Next up on Trading Spaces for Nerds, ac1dl0rd and disruptor15 switch laptops for a day, but will flame wars erupt when one 31337 hax0r changes the other's wallpaper to cute and cuddly kittens? Stay tuned and find out in 30 minutes on the next Trading Spaces for Nerds.

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