In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Moshe Goldfarb
<brick.n.straw@gmail.com>
wrote
on Wed, 5 Mar 2008 12:23:04 -0500
<1gadm4bnqljf$.g9qeuh3pyebn.dlg@40tude.net>:
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:30:30 -0000, Chris Mattern wrote:
>
>> On 2008-03-05, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> It might be more complicated than this. They are said to have
>>> back doors in *standard protocols* (Linux included) [1,2,3,4]
>>> and these are hard to get by
>>
>> Linux is not a protocol, standard or otherwise.
>
> To a Linux advocacy loon:
>
> A. Linux is the kernel.
> B. Except when Linux is not the kernel.
>
> Pick either A or B depending upon what argument you are involved in and
> which one suits your POV at the moment.
>

Linux is an entire generic distro system in most posts
here. Depending on the context one might specify which
distro, especially when one finds bugs; however, most
packages are available for the distros in some form,
and bugs in those packages are therefore bugs in Linux.

For example, almost all distros have Open Office, and
the bugs in Open Office are therefore part of Linux.

To a purist (such as myself), this logic verges on
the bizarre, but it does make sense; it is not the
responsibility of the *user* to pin it down further than
"Linux is broken", but the responsibility of the packager
and possibly the system administrator. After all, the
user doesn't see Gnome, Nautilus, xterm, oowriter, or gpdf;
he sees a system display which he clicks on. Pick a menu,
do something, oops it's broken, report it to IT.

(Unless the user *IS* IT -- as in the home user, in which
case, he either looks up the relevant symptoms using Google
or carts the broken unit to a fix-it guy who can hopefully
make the magic box work again.)

The Linux distros have many doors, depending on what
daemons are installed. For example, Apache opens port 80
by default; Tomcat and/or JBoss opens ports 8080, 8009,
and 1099; NFS uses port 2049; a DNS-capable server opens
port 53. All of these use well-established protocols.

(Not that it matters; network address translation (NAT)
blocks all incoming packets unless one specifically opens
a port through the router, therefore making Windows'
relative openness far less of an issue than it used to be.)

Fortunately, the system administrator is in general control
of which ports Linux opens -- if he's knowledgeable enough.

Unfortunately, Windows appears simpler, as Windows has
more advanced GUI underpinnings. (They've had more time
to work on configuration applets.)

--
#191, ewill3@earthlink.net
Murphy was an optimist.

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