Dear Sir,
With reference to your article in HT on netbook security. The first
impression one gets from it is that it is aimed at hitting the netbook
sales. If the authors really had a proper understanding of operating systems
and security issues related to them they would have never posted such an
article. Neither the bigger notebooks nor the smaller netbooks come
pre-installed with any firewalls or anti-virus software. The anti-virus that
is pre-installed on some notebooks that have an operating system
pre-installed is only a trial version which will expire anyway. Antivirus
software slows down any system and the problem is not limited to netbooks
only. By the way the netbook has a 1.6 GHz. processor and a 1 GB RAM and a
100+ GB hard disk, which is quite sufficient for a normal anti-virus
software. I happen to use one with an anti-virus installed. What about the
expensive business cell phones that are fully net enabled and are used to
surf the web, check mails, blog and chat? Is there any scope for putting any
of the standard antivirus software in them?
The most important point missed out by the authors is that security issues
arise from faulty operating systems that are breeding grounds for software
viruses. Since these operating systems are closed and do not allow any
security audit of their program code by outsiders, there is no way one can
know their inherent flaws and predict as well as prevent future security
problems. In order to overcome this limitation of closed code software,
there are Free(dom) software operating systems that are openly audited by
experts outside the core developer group and the general public. This
enhances the immunity level of these operating systems to such an extent
that they do not require any antivirus software. They come preloaded with
security measures in various stages that prevent virus files from executing
in the system or propagating to other computers on the network. The good
news is that these Free(dom) operating systems can now be installed on the
netbooks too and users can make full utilisation of the hardware resources
for their own work.
I sincerely hope HT will let its readers know more about these secure
Free(dom) operating systems like Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva
etc.
--
Regards,
Rony.
GNU/Linux
No Viruses
No Spyware
Only Freedom.