(Click on the banner for a link to the source story). Turns out this advertising banner was too "offensive" to be put up in Nashville. In the same country that allowed this :-
The acid test for freedom of speech is to allow speech that you do not agree with; looks like America fails.
This is a little rant about those people who feel the need to jump on every announcement of a security issue with Linux or Windows, and claim their favourite operating system is more secure. These days such rants are little more than fanboyism, and childish at that.
I'm an old Unix guy (and thus am into Linux rather than Windows), and in the past did used to ramble on about how insecure Windows was. And Windows used to be a complete disaster area when it came to security.
But that has changed. Whilst I'm still not a big Windows fan, the security of Windows itself has improved to the point where it's not too bad.
Of course there are plenty of software vendors out there who are completely clueless when it comes to security, so any time you add some piece of cool corporate software to a Linux or Windows server you're running a big risk.
But back to the haters.
The most irritating thing about the whole 'my operating system is more secure than your operating system' is a simplistic comparison of Linux and Windows. They are not directly comparible. – simply counting the number of security vulnerabilities in "Linux" and "Windows" is an overly simplistic comparson.
First of all, Linux has many more components than Windows; partally because Linux tends to throw in the kitchen sink, and partially because of a different philosophy – the "Unix way" is to build many small tools rather than one big tool. But just because Linux includes tons of stuff, doesn't make insecurities in all that stuff a problem on your server – for example, none of my web servers have a web browser installed so all those hundreds of web browser bugs are irrelevant to my servers.
Windows itself has caught onto the trick that has been standard practice for decades – only install the stuff you actually need. Whilst there are popular Linux distributions that do the same thing (Debian, and Ubuntu amonst others), there are still some that tend to install far too much (RedHat, SLES, etc.).
Secondly the number of vulnerabliities does not take into account how serious each vulnerability is. Ten privilege escalation vulnerabilities comes nowhere close to a shellshock.
When you come down to it, the choice of which operating system to run has less of an effect on how vulmerable your server is than who runs your server. A tightly controlled Windows server that is patched often and well configured is far more secure than a Linux server that is patched when installed (if then!) and then left alone by an administrator who assumes that "out of the box" configurations are suitable.
Wandering through Youtube as you do, I happened to come across :-
.. and was immediately struck by how dumb the selection of "facts" were :-
Out of a list of 15 so-called "facts" at least 50% were horse-shit and in the case of the remainder, there's a fair few I've not bothered checking. Best bet is when you look at a video claimimg to have a top 10 list of something is to take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.
A while back, I commented on the Tories cheering the cuts bringing in a new era of austerity. I said at the time we should remember their cheers, and now we should do the remembering.
Whether or not the austerity cuts were necessary, the cheering by the Tories showed their true colours – they would rather cut benefits to the poor and working classes to reduce taxes for their rich friends.
Remember the cheering when you listen to their wheedling speaches to get your votes.
Remember the cheering when they claim to be on the side of ordinary workers.
Remember the cheering when you go into vote. And vote for anybody else (except UKIP).
After a public release of a certain video of animal cruelty found within a halal slaughterhouse, there has been a certain amount of "noise" regarding animal cruelty :-
For the benefit of those too sensible to hit "play", some of the most striking things about the video :-
I should say from the beginning that I'm a vegetarian so I'm unlikely to be sympathetic to the problems encountered by slaughterhouses (shut 'em all!). I'm also an atheist so I'm unlikely to have sympathy for religious beliefs insisting on medieval slaughterhouse techniques (if you can find a sheep that requests Halal or Kosher execution, then by all means go ahead).
But the reaction to the videos has seemed to concentrate on point 3 above, Or more specifically the need to kill by a quick cut of a knife.
Whilst I'm not keen in the quick cut method, it does seem to me that the cruelty of that method is outweighed by far, by the attitude of the slaughterhouse staff and the design of the slaughterhouse. In other words, I can easily imagine seeing a video portraying pretty much the same level of cruelty when the slaughterhouse staff are wielding a stunbolt gun.
It seems to me that to reduce the level of cruelty, we need to have robust supervision by people who are not going to put up with any kind of abuse. People with the power to hit the big red button, and send everyone home for the day.
Yes, there's an argument about whether the requirements for Halal and Kosher count as animal cruelty, but this video shows far more generalised animal cruelty that can be found at any badly run slaughterhouse. The question is: Just how many slaughterhouses are badly run?