On Tuesday 05 August 2003 10:45, James Edward John Taylor wrote:
If we went back in time toooo around 95 and changed the way a couple of companies dealt with the internet, and lets suppose microsoft went south bigtime, so becomes only a small "bit" player...
All those people writing that sort of thing would now be writing that sort of thing to attack linux systems, wouldnt it be conceivable there would be more linux viruses then there currnetly are?
I suppose you have a point, but
In all consumer orientated versions of Windows the desktop user has ultimate privileges on the machine, all software they run has similar access.
Up until recently there was no packet filtering, no concept of file permissions or user permissions in Windows, holes in the security model are fixed not when they are discovered but when they are public enough to cause a major concern, Any user executed program (intentionally or otherwise) can open up any network port or access any file on the machine without the user even being aware.
Plus the diversity of the Linux system makes it hard to get software running even with the users help sometimes :o)
So my response to this would have to be yes there would be more Linux viruses etc... But I suspect not as many as there have been for Windows.