Dear Sir,
With reference to your article in HT on netbook security. The first impression one gets from it is that it is aimed at hitting the netbook sales. If the authors really had a proper understanding of operating systems and security issues related to them they would have never posted such an article. Neither the bigger notebooks nor the smaller netbooks come pre-installed with any firewalls or anti-virus software. The anti-virus that is pre-installed on some notebooks that have an operating system pre-installed is only a trial version which will expire anyway. Antivirus software slows down any system and the problem is not limited to netbooks only. By the way the netbook has a 1.6 GHz. processor and a 1 GB RAM and a 100+ GB hard disk, which is quite sufficient for a normal anti-virus software. I happen to use one with an anti-virus installed. What about the expensive business cell phones that are fully net enabled and are used to surf the web, check mails, blog and chat? Is there any scope for putting any of the standard antivirus software in them?
The most important point missed out by the authors is that security issues arise from faulty operating systems that are breeding grounds for software viruses. Since these operating systems are closed and do not allow any security audit of their program code by outsiders, there is no way one can know their inherent flaws and predict as well as prevent future security problems. In order to overcome this limitation of closed code software, there are Free(dom) software operating systems that are openly audited by experts outside the core developer group and the general public. This enhances the immunity level of these operating systems to such an extent that they do not require any antivirus software. They come preloaded with security measures in various stages that prevent virus files from executing in the system or propagating to other computers on the network. The good news is that these Free(dom) operating systems can now be installed on the netbooks too and users can make full utilisation of the hardware resources for their own work.
I sincerely hope HT will let its readers know more about these secure Free(dom) operating systems like Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva etc.