Wrong, windows in inherently insecure. Which is why "Longhorn" is
being completely rewritten from the ground up.
It's absolutely true that Windows has some design considerations that place other priorities above security. However, most of these could probably be changed fairly quickly. It certainly wouldn't be necessary to rewrite more than a very small fraction of the total code base.
When MS claims to be starting from scratch on Longhorn, you can bet that is largely hype. I'm sure that very large chunks of existing code will be moved over, although most likely after being given a thorough review.
See
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/33226.html for more
details on why Windows is more insecure by design than Unix systems.
This article is one I've seen before, and it makes some good points. However, once again, they are failing to make a distinction between the behaviour of the operating system and the behaviour of an individual application running on that operating system.
EMAIL-spread viruses are by far the most common on Windows, but this is a method of distribution that exploits security flaws in AN APPLICATION PROGRAM. The same exact problem CAN exist on any computer system, and in fact the same problem has been seen on the Macintosh. The FREQUENCY of such occurrances is the only real difference between systems.
I especially like where the article makes the point that, because of the file permissions granted to the non-administrator user on Linux, a virus infection could only affect the files belonging to that user, and not the system files. Well, that's just great. All of your document files can get killed, but at least the system still boots. Well, I suppose that's better than nothing, but it's not something I'd be bragging about.
Mike
