[LUAU] MS to EOL Win98 and WinMe - July 11

Peter Besenbruch prb at lava.net
Thu Jul 6 10:43:11 PDT 2006


> First, Windows ME by some definitions can't be rooted, since it only has
> one user. 

Think of it as a feature, not a bug. ;)

> Second, any worms that might do any sort of automatic "rooting" almost
> certainly do NOT apply to the dos-based versions of windows.  From
> sarc.com about blaster worm:

I've noticed this a lot. It's as if Windows XP with the release of SP2 
had finally caught up with the high security of Windows 98.

> The only people who have it right are OSX and a few linux
> distributions.  OSX has no open ports by default.  Almost all Linux
> distributions have ssh enabled by default, which has had a few
> exploits.  I strongly believe that ALL open ports should be an opt-in
> policy and not an opt-out/firewall policy. 

I use Kanotix, which installs ssh-server, but doesn't run it by default. 
Indeed, it doesn't run networking by default, which makes it one of the 
most secure OSes I know of. ;) Still, I tend to go through and uninstall 
a lot of stuff I, or the user won't need.

As for Windows 98, I still use it, as does my daughter. I use it for 
reference works that aren't available on Linux. My daughter uses it for 
running software that her school mandates that won't run on Linux, and 
which has trouble running on Wine. It runs under Qemu. It's slow, but 
not too bad. I run it with the "-net none" option. It's quite "secure" 
that way.

btw. Windows 98 almost never crashes when running under Linux.

--
Hawaiian Astronomical Society: http://www.hawastsoc.org
HAS Deepsky Atlas: http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky



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