| Can we afford not to give our kids Linux? |
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| Written by Stan Beer | |
| Saturday, 10 November 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2 Having recently migrated to Ubuntu from Windows, I fully appreciate the risks that our kids are exposed to everytime they venture online with Windows. Basically, kids online are an accident waiting to happen, regardless of what anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware they happen to be running. Every other day, some anti-malware vendor issues a media release about a zero day attack of a new worm or Trojan horse that has slipped under the guard of known anti-malware signatures. At least once a month - and quite often more frequently - we hear of critical vulnerabilities in Windows whatever the version that require software patching. Microsoft freely admits that exploits for these vulnerabilities could hand control of a computer to a remote attacker. Sometimes exploits are already in the market before patches arrive. In addition, the anti-malware penicillin that Windows computers are required to run these days just to keep the online experience moderately safe are so resource hungry that computers thousands of times as powerful as the primitive number crunchers that put men on the moon nearly 40 years ago are as slow as a wet week. My highly configured dual core processor computer with 4GB of RAM and a powerful dedicated graphics processor running Windows Home Server 2003 ran slower than a much weaker computer I had in the pre-Internet late 1980s running DOS. Most average computer users, myself included, would not have a clue which is the best security package to run on our Windows computers. We tend to go with the names we know Symantec/Norton, McAfee, CA, Kaspersky, Microsoft, but we don't really know what will happen if we open an attachment in a dodgy email or click on a link that leads to a malicious web page. Maybe our security package will capture and quarantine the deception or maybe not. It's the one time in a hundred that slips under the guard of these security packages that can do all the damage and with our kids that's not good enough. |
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