Why moving to Linux to avoid Microsoft spying is impossible for most people

i really don't care who came up with it and the purpose of it,
if it's an open and free system there needs to be a command or option to disable it, if i so choose,
that's where the freedom comes in, being forced logged is not freedom whatever the excuse is for the log

 

One thing that has always made me doubt whether it is a good idea to even try to switch to Linux (so all sorts of more general issues like me wanting to use the whole up-to-date Adobe Suite because I'm not a casual user for whom Gimp is sufficient aside) is that there seem to be so many exploits for all sorts of things that will just grant random hackers admin rights and do whatever the hell they want. Maybe that's even easier on Windows but while I myself have seen Linux machines getting hacked in a LAN within minutes, I've never seen that happen to Windows machines. Personal firewalls seem to make the latter pretty secure against most attacks with relative ease. Maybe such things exist for Linux by now as well but... looking at the very first post in this thread, it seems like "intuitive use" is still not something that Linux supports.

And so I wonder whether a system that I don't want to invest 10 hours per week in maintaining can ever be as secure (when it comes to private attackers... let's ignore Microsoft and governments for a minute... at least to me, random psychos are the more immediate threat on the Internet) as some Windows setup with one of the various personal firewalls that have proven themselves to be reasonably reliable over the last decade or so.

 

There are exploits everywhere, but here is the thing - in Linux software from repositories is updated along with the system updates.
Which means, basically, that all of your software is always up to date. It's also more secure, in Windows every application has developed the habit of installing an update service that runs constantly and that is not particularly good.

 

@notthere: linux is not intuitive because you want it to be like Windows. If your only language is English and you decided to try learning Latin, I'm sure your first observation would be - "No one can learn Latin because it isn't intuitive."

Years ago I thought I would learn assembly language - guess why I gave up?

 

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Quick thoughts:
All companies operating in a country, the jurisdiction thereof, have to comply with the laws of that country/jurisdiction. The word - comply - is open to wide interpretation. Does that compilation come with a preemption, too? I guess so. Most of the security agencies of the countries in or near American sphere of influence, such as NSA/CIA/FBI,Mossad,MI5/GHCQ,RAW,et al, already have access to Windows source code, directly or indirectly, anyway. Stuxent was a good reminder of that.

xxx stuff?! He He... take extra precaution, though, to avoid any concerted character assassination or personal embarrassment in front of near and dear ones.

Somehow spoofing/manipulating/poisoning DNS/name resolving by using hosts file or other methods seems to provide a sense of security albeit a false one.
Dedicated firewall solutions, too, sometimes aren't immune from security agencies.
Cisco(and Netgear?) products are good examples of that.

I've tried to harden security of my internal network from the internet by using self compiled(a case of false security?! ) CentOS router/GW/AP with SELinux/iptables and country blocks(packet filtering). My primary concern of doing that then was intrusion from outside.
Even ICMP(ping payloads) were monitored, then.

 

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Not entirely true.

I use to Net Send my brother "Press OK if your gay" all the time. He'd come rushing into my room saying "quick, come and look, that hacker is back putting messages on my screen"

 

I didn't say no one can learn it. But maybe I misspoke. Maybe I should've said "inefficient" instead.
Your example with assembly language is actually a good comparison. Imagine any current application, whether it is a game, a music player or whatever being developed solely using that. Nobody (well... maybe almost nobody) would think to try that. Because all sane developers have seen the benefits that high level, object-oriented programming languages provide.

And by the way... I have never said that Linux is not intuitive. I said seems like.
I posted a question (multiple ones in a way, I guess), not a statement.

 

Well... it was at a dorm... let's just say that students did not appreciate the banning of some sites and were keen on making their own rules. And so we did.
Also, it was a dorm full of obviously more or less irresponsible 14-18 year old kids who occasionally put trojans on each other's machines. Yet, aside from the infected ones, I never saw any Windows machine that got controlled remotely.

And actually, I'm just remembering a case where a co-worker at a company kept remotely logging onto my workstation and starting xeyes. I started writing a script which would shut down any machine that did that but... decided to go the soft route and just send a warning message to myself with the ID of the user logging on instead. Just in case an admin needed to do actual maintenance work. He may have been pissed off...

So... it happens. Although I guess the latter isn't really "hacking".

 

I recently made the switch to linux mint as my primary os its been hard to let go of windows as the top choice hardest thing will be the games support for linux even though some of my games are natively supported others will have to play with wine and some probably boot to win7 but so far so good

 

Or you could get really creative with BIOS exploits