hi all
last week i had appeared for an interview where they asked me as u work on windows & unix tell me what are the advantages of UNIX over windows & vice versa ..i gave 2-3 reasons but when i told that unix is more secure than windows he asked me how ? i was speechless. then i googled about that but didnt find good answer for that. if u guys can tell me how its more secure ( or not ) than windows i will be thankful

Hi zedex,

You just asked a nice question, you should open a poll for it.

The first thing I came up with is just one word: VIRUS!!. Windows is a security hole because of the virus.


Let's see what everybody else think.

Regards

Ermur

Doesn't WINDOW commands go through extra hoops (OSI layers?) where UNIX is more direct?

virus is just piece of code it depends on you whether to execute it or not ?
same thing can be done for unix also ..i.e depends on user
( infact i work on both unix & windows server we never faced any problem related to virus in last 1yr+ time since i joined ) but i do agree that there are more viruses made for windows

i read that unix file permission is better that windows can anybody justify that ?

This thread is very close to breaking
Rule # 8 No BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows or similar threads.

I shall keep the thread open. Be very technical in your answers.

Any reply which compares different OS'es and brings out the negative points of one or the other OS will lead to closing this thread. For eg, the following statement.

Another perspective to consider is "how many people understand the commands to operate?"

Novice users will only execute commands and menus that they are familiar with. Thus, a computer system that utilizes commands with different format (think a foreign language) could be considered safer.
Much like if you and a friend were in a restaurant and spoke in French. Some may be able to hear what you say, and a smaller set of people sitting nearby might (or might not) be able to speak French. Therefore, your conversation would be statistically more secure.

There are of course caveats. Just as some people are fluent in many languages, you may not be as safe as you thought. Also, this theory would not apply if you were at a company where there was an expectation of advanced computer skills. To my spoken language analogy, people should not expect to speak in confidence in any language at the cafeteria at the United Nations Building.

vino makes a good point about 8 and at first I decided against posting in this thread. But I guess I will take a shot at this....

First, The Microsoft world and the Unix world have a different view of what an OS is. When Dan Bernstein announced that he was failing his entire security class because they only found 44 Unix security flaws, quite a few Unix folks called "foul". For example, one bug was in Mplayer, an ASF video player. Unix folks tend to not consider a tool like that to be an OS component. But Microsoft folks do. In both OS's the majority of the security flaws are in applications far above the kernel. Both OS's have rather secure kernels. Microsoft possibly brought this on themselves. For example, they have fought in court to have IE (Internet Explorer) as an OS component. But we do not a level playing field here... an IE bug is considered an XP problem while a Firefox or Opera bug is not charged to Unix.

That aside, there is a fundamental Windows security problem. Most Windows users run all the time with administrator privileges. If you try to run as a non-administrator, many application programs will croak. Microsoft has done little to fight this. In contrast, Unix users are strongly encouraged to operate as root only when needed. Very few Unix or Linux users ever surf the web as root. This really helps security a lot. Meanwhile most IE users happily surf the web in admin mode.

I doubt that anyone from Microsoft is reading this. But the number one suggestion I would make to them is to get users out of Admin mode. Applications that only run in admin mode should be considered unsafe and publicly labelled as such. In fact, IE should refuse to connect to the Internet in Admin mode. Media Player should refuse to run at all in Admin mode. And so on. Some security problems will still exist, but the severity of these problems would be greatly reduced.