You can have child porn on your computer and not know

Post Reply New Topic

http://www.gainesville.com/article/2009 ... a-PC-virus


Another reason why M$ software is crapware. Using Microsoft's Proprietary crap could get you arrested for child porn. Not to mention at least 52% of Windows User deal with spyware/malware intrusions to the point of using the software recovery CD's at least once. However Ubuntu will cure all!! !

Could that be a valid defense if this happens to someone unknowingly.

It could, however the police will check your computer usage history before the child porn outbreak and check your criminal history. As well as several other things.

So all those pedophiles have to do is let their computer get infested?

M$ should start advertising Windows+IE as the safest combo to surf porn.

There is already a long thread about this in the News and Current Events forum.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt111505.html

Porn on the cob topic

So do tell us how to ascertain if such horror is on a computer, and to find the origin, and then we can call the cops on them.

Thanks.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that the is a way to trace back to who is responsible. If the material is on your computer, it's more likely to be you who'll get into trouble.

@Sue: The easist way for a layperson to determine this would be to set your computer to show all Hidden Files and Folders (this is in Folder options under Tools when you have Windows Explorer open) and then search for anything ending with common image extensions (*.JPG, *.GIF, *.BMP, etc). This should return a whole host of results that you can view in Thumbnail view (under Views across the top) for quick checking. Also a good way to check that kids are keeping out of trouble. It won't catch every image, but it is a good way to get a general idea. You can check videos similarly (*.MPG, *.MPEG, *.MOV, etc).

Otherwise, always run valid, updated antivirus software.

Are you just using this to attempt to justify your anti-Microsoft bullcrap?

I dare you to explain how it could happen in Linux.

This is only one of the reason why I do not trust Microsoft operating systems on my computer. I also happen to live in the Police States of America, and with a court system as fickle as what is in this country, I would fear being charged with ANY crime let along something as serious as this.

Okay, it CANNOT happen in Linux... YET! But when Linux becomes popular enough, viruses will be written to infect Linux computers. It's as simple as installing a Trojan package and allowing it to take control of your computer or something like that.

Not likely that this will ever happen in Linux.

First off, Linux is highly unlikely to ever gain a very large market share.

Secondly, Linux is inherently a much more secure system than Windows. The permissions scheme is rather better-conceived, and most distros prevent their users from running around with administrator privileges all the time- in contrast to MS, which defaults to making the unsuspecting user an all-powerful admin. Trojans would not likely be a serious problem in open-source software, since people can check your source code. And the repository system of software installation provides obvious security benefits over the Windows method of finding and downloading some random freeware app.

And finally, if Linux ever did have serious security problems come up, there's always OpenBSD.

Possibly.

Did you hear there is a trojan horse for iphones now? Viruses are starting to hit Apple products.

Anyway. Linux machine are better sandboxed. Its quite possible for a piece of malware to gain access to your /home folders - personal data, like documents and files in windows - but it would take root access to get at the operating system. Vista and 7, with their UAC feature go a long ways towards emulating this. You'll note that there is much less virus in the news since vista came out.

Linux is more amenable to rapid reinstallation too. You dont have to worry about using up licence permissions either.

As well, a feature not so often used in linux is the ability to disallow file execution in a partition. This effectively seals the personal data section from viruses, and they gain no toe hold to attack the system with permission escalation.

And if that isnt enough, you can escalate and use SELinux, which is security enhanced linux features.

Further, the response time for security issues in linux is often 24 hours or less. There are several hundred thousand programmers world wide working on linux development. That can be a lot of eyes on a problem.

Just for comparison Microsoft and OSX each employ about 10 000 programmers, primarily in only north America.

Its probably a long way from linux viruses..

That's a nice trick, and a good reason to have /home and perhaps /usr as separate partitions. At that point, the primary security vulnerability I can think of would be in phishing scams, and that issue is a PEBKAC.


And how many of those are working on security issues? Also notable is that both Apple and Microsoft rely at least partially on security through obscurity (they keep the details of their system and any security vulnerabilities secret in the hope that people won't find the weaknesses to exploit), whereas full disclosure is the norm in Linux.

Yeah its a neat trick, and it has to be done when the partition is formatted. I dont believe you can change it without reformatting.

/usr has to allow execution though. Its where all the software installs reside.

I recently played with /usr in its own partition, but it seems it must be formatted for an install. Next I will try /usr/local, which shouldnt require this. This will allow me to not need to reinstall software.