You can have child porn on your computer and not know

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No, no, no! Windows 7 is the best thing since sliced bread, remember? Flaws are impossible. And no, I'm not endorsing Mac OS X. I actually hate Mac OS X. I do still used Mac OS 9 quite loyally, though. In my experience, it doesn't have nearly as many problems as the modern OSes do. Granted, it's archaic in some aspects, like memory management. But whatever.

So you think that complexity issues are contributing to the problems with modern operating systems?

Fuzzy, how's it going?
Is that option only in the Debian distro? I just clean installed Ubuntu 9.10. First I didn't find any option for noexec. Second the partition I added (for /home in my trial) is exec by default.

If your installer have that option, can you have a look at /etc/fstab? What's the options for that partition? Does it contain noexec? If it's there, does removing it cause the partition to be exec again?

Hi I never got to it, but I woke up dreaming about it.

That option appears only in the alternate installer. The liveCD wont do.

Tonight, for sure. Sorry about that.

I'm still indifferent towards the registry format. Perhaps I just haven't encountered any corruptions yet. I can imagine the text format would make scavenging much easier in that scenario. So it does have its advantages.
On the other hand, there's no hard rule forcing a program to use the registry, Windows even provides APIs to read/write to text-based .ini files. Windows also has a per user application data directory, so if a program likes to do things Linux's way, they can. In fact, a lot of freewares do it that way. The only thing that really must go into the registry are system wide settings.


Changing "Documents and Settings" aren't that difficult, it's in a registry key called Shell Folders. Changing "Programs Files" directory though is another story. Anyway that won't get you far if you upgrade. You are supposed to use the "Windows Easy Transfer"/"User State Migration Tool" in that case.

Vista improved the situation for the documents, you can change the document folder directly in the UI. On Win7, the document directory is a library, not only can you change its location, you can even ask it to aggregate files from many directories.

All in all, upgrading Windows is definitely not something I look forward to. I'm not sure how it compares to Linux, since I often clean install Linux as it isn't my main OS (and thus not much data there).


The registry uses the same ACL as NTFS. Each key is a securable object and can be given its own permissions.


It's called junction on NTFS. Windows will be happy as long as it's local (ie on not a network drive).


Windows do seem to attract more crapwares. Unfortunately some even sell well.

It reminds me of something I have been looking for a while. Do you know of any programs like sandboxie on Linux?
Basically it virtualizes all the writes of a program. When changes are made to a file, only that program see the changes, the original copy in the real system remains untouched. When the sandbox is cleared, all changes are gone. You see, it's very useful for surfing and testing new programs.

Thanks for all the info on windows. Its good to know.

I'll have a look for sandboxie type things. Normally I would just use a virtual box. Another trick I use is ram disks. For example, all my cached browser objects are stored in ram. Its not that I need the security, but I like to think it thrashes the disk less. I also eschew a swap/page.

Since I have tons of ram, and never need to hibernate, swap makes little sense. In fact, I've never had it accessed, so I just stopped formatting a partition for it.

The article referenced in that thread talks about IE and OE. If you use neither of them, then it won't concern you.

There's however one important point in that article that somehow no one mentioned.
It's those file indexing programs. The FindFast mentioned, and new comers like Google Desktop Search, Indexing Service in Windows, Spotlight in OSX, etc.
Do you use any of them? They all collect a bunch of information about files on your disk. You may be surprised if you don't really know what you are getting into.

Besides what I've already said in that thread. I just want to clearify that "History" and "Temporary Internet Files" are treated specially by Explorer. It will show you the "History View" and "Cache View" instead of the underlining files. That is they presented them in some nice looking way, I think that is a far cry to say they are hiding them for some malicious intentions.

All I can say is I've gone to several malware sites before and haven't gotten a single virus or spyware download. That's one of the luxuries of using Mac OS X and Firefox.

Basement dwellers on the chans are sick of mac.

OS X will be destroyed

I don't use Internet Explorer or Outlook Express. My initial statement was a response to another poster. Recently I've been using Ubuntu. The only thing I've still been using Window's for is games. After reading that thread again, I don't think there's malicious intention involved.

Just an update, I just tried Mandriva 2010. The installer can set advance mount options and the settings is written to /etc/fstab after format. If I removed noexec from fstab, the partition becomes executable again.

Thanks for finding out. I guess my laziness really does pay off!