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Poll: About your security settings when running your desktop Operating System?

Poll: About your security settings when running your desktop Operating System?

  • I run Linux/UNIX, as non-root

    Votes: 6 31.6%
  • I run Linux/UNIX, and I browse the intertubes as root

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I run Mac OS X, and I trust Apple has this thing well designed

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I run Win9x to browse the intertubes, enough said about security

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I run NT-XP, and I run as Administrator

    Votes: 4 21.1%
  • I run NT-XP, and I run as a standard user

    Votes: 1 5.3%
  • I run Vista-7, with an Administrator-like account and I have UAC disabled

    Votes: 4 21.1%
  • I run Vista-7, with an Administrator-like account and I rely on UAC for security

    Votes: 2 10.5%
  • I run Vista-7, and I run as a non Administrator-like user

    Votes: 2 10.5%
  • I run some other OS as my primary desktop Operating System

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    19

Pepinno

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2007
Messages
610
Location
Barcelona
So I was wondering how the forum members (in this quite technical forum) run they day-to-day desktop operating system, with relation to their security settings. And by that, I mean specially the user rights of the credentials you use to login into your desktop and with which you browse the Internet.

Unix/Linux has always made an obvious divide between root and non-root users.

Windows, is a different thing: although the NT family has that divide also built-in, most users and developers came from the DOS/Windows95 way of doing things, and therefore it has been a tradition for Windows 2k/XP users to also run as Administrators for their day-to-day use of the computer. And that tradition has been a source for millions of virus infections for Windows users.

That tradition, of course, was driven also by the seer amount of software for Windows that was developed for the Windows 95 "security model", and which would fail to run properly if executed with non-Administrator rights. Microsoft was aware of that "problem", which they called "LUA bug", and tried to (somewhat) solve it in Vista/7 with UAC.

So, please vote in the poll and lets see how securely/insecurely we tend to run our desktops...
 
For regular la de dah stuff, I use my Windows 7 HP Computer, for online banking and more sensitive stuff, I have a Linux computer.
 
I use my Core i7 upgraded Vista computer for mainly everything to do on the internet and networking related stuff. UAC is disabled for exceeding the annoyance cap. I've got the latest version of Avast on here and a hardware based firewall filtering incoming connections. It's proved to be all that I need security wise. No attacks or virus events have occurred since I got this computer.

For downloading and storing gigabytes of DOS utilities and other programs, I've got a custom build Windows XP Core 2 Duo system with AVG.
 
I use my Core i7 upgraded Vista computer for mainly everything to do on the internet and networking related stuff. UAC is disabled for exceeding the annoyance cap.

If you are doing that with an Administrator-like account, you are aware you have about the same security than a Windows 95-based computer, don't you?
 
Somewhat OT, but if you're running Vista with a Core i7 machine, you've hobbled the machine. Windows 7 has proper support for the I7's hyperthreading in the scheduler -- Vista does not. When I upgraded to 7 from Vista, my Core i7 machine was not only noticeably more responsive with the same typical workloads, but I could encode video about 20% faster. I kicked myself for a few days for not doing it much sooner (had been running Vista for 18 months).

This assumes you turn on hyperthreading. If you have an i7 with hyperthreading turned off (or an i5 or i3 which don't have hyperthreading), then it doesn't matter.
 
I use a domain administrator user account on windows machines, and normal user account on linux machines, but I perpetually have a terminal open and su'd

I don't have to worry about anyone else here gaining access to my network, and I'm very careful about the possibility of malware.
 
What's with the list of MS minutiae and lumping all the Linux and Unix together? :)

And just for the record, I also run MS-DOS on the network as a regular user - not that there's anything "regular" about me.
 
What's with the list of MS minutiae and lumping all the Linux and Unix together? :)

In UNIX, there are 40 years of tradition of "proper operation" versus improper one. (Some times, things are done perfect in the first try.)

In Windows, the tradition of "proper operation" is much less established, and therefore much more convoluted. (Some times, things take many tries to reach some level of perfection.)
 
In UNIX, there are 40 years of tradition of "proper operation" versus improper one. (Some times, things are done perfect in the first try.)

In Windows, the tradition of "proper operation" is much less established, and therefore much more convoluted. (Some times, things take many tries to reach some level of perfection.)

Excellent answer! I didn't think of that. Indeed there really isn't a lot of differences among unix like systems.
 
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