Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Black Screen of Death!!

[Pater Mann]

Clarke Computers wrote:
> Hopefully this will bring Gnu/Linux into a more favourable light.

As I am the one that friends and family turn to when they need help
sorting out problems on their PCs, I also welcome anything that
promotes alternatives to Windows. However, I should point out that
that, in this case, Microsoft are not responsible for the problem -
ironically, it was actually caused by a piece of malware that Prevx
were investigating, not the Windows updates as claimed by Prevx (they
have since apologised). I agree that it could be seen as a Windows
vulnerability that by denying access to a particular key in the
registry you can prevent a user from getting to the desktop but
Unix/Linux systems have a similar "vulnerability". I accidentally
renamed my home directory once and that prevented me logging in as
that user at all - denying access to the home directory would have the
same effect. Even worse, just imagine the chaos it would cause if all
access was denied to the /etc directory!

Although Unix/Linux-based systems are inherently more secure than
Windows (and are easier to harden), people tend to forget that
rootkits were originally created for Unix(-like) systems (hence the
name "rootkit") and have only been created for Windows relatively
recently so attention to security is still important whatever the
operating system.

patermann