Redmond are at it again. They are still planning to use UEFI secure boot to lock down ARM powered devices and prevent them from booting, or even allowing the installation of Linux or UNIX based operating systems. This is part of a plan by Microsoft to block the installation of open source operating systems and only allow the use of the proprietary OS from Redmond instead. This is typical of a company that is shipping an operating system that is riddled with god knows how many security issues and holes that Malware can exploit to lodge into the operating system. Windows 7 is a pretty secure Windows release. But Windows XP is still widely used, which is pretty shocking after all these years. There is a free open source Windows alternative, ReactOS, that is attempting to create a free Windows like operating system, I am not sure how well hardware compatibility is working right now, but this looks to be a very promising alternative to the Windows OS. http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html This is an important project for those who want to have a Windows installation instead of using Wine on Linux to run their Windows software.
The PDF download area at http://www.securitronlinux.com/lc has been revamped with a whole new look. I coded an index.php file that reads the folder and outputs a directory listing that looks better than the default Apache directory listing output. I hope you like this change, and I have added a couple of new text files about hacking and UNIX, they are very interesting files and very educational as well. I will add some more as I find them, even the older text files have some educational value. The old Cult of the Dead Cow text files are an awesome read if you happen to find them around. The old days of hobbyist hackers working on computer systems in their garage like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak seem to be in the past, now computers are so ubiquitous that people can easily buy a prebuilt machine from Dell, in the old days there were computers thatyou had to program yourself by flicking a row of switches on the front of the machine up and down. That was the Altair machine, a dinosaur by the standards of today. Nowadays computers have more power than they could have dreamed of that long ago. But the main operating system used by millions of people around the world is an insecure load of crap.
Thank god for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, they offer far more security and reliability than Windows, the Windows 8 release is impending and I can not wait for the official release to see how that operating system turns out. After the enormous hype that the release will attract in the Information Technology media, how secure and reliable will this operating system really be? Will it fail miserably or will it be a success? The Metro interface is intended for the mobile market with the Windows phone being quite popular, but not as much as the Iphone 4. Linux and the *BSD operating systems have the advantage of stability and security on their side, they do not rely on a flashy new interface and expensive advertising campaigns to gain users, they do it by the quality of their programming and the fact that you do not get Malware infestations on UNIX or Linux machines like you do with a Windows box. Although Firefox, Noscript and common sense can help as well. Noscript can intercept click-jacking attempts, which can happen with the Firefox browser on any OS, so everyone should use Firefox and Noscript, it will keep you much safer.
Internet Explorer 9.0 has an adblocking and script blocking extension that you can install to keep you safer from annoying scripts and annoying advertising. I know that you should not run Internet Explorer, but it has a nice fast interface and when you are browsing with images turned off, you can right click on the image download placeholder and click the show picture option and it will show the picture in place instead of in a new tab. Firefox needs this option badly. And it scales webpages very well. Still, the Firefox 10.0 browser on the Gnome-fallback desktop with the Windows Segoe UI font is just about perfect with Ubuntu 12.04 and it is very fast, but it has a bug where I get a kernel panic when I plug in a Micro SD or a SD card into my computer. But copying the files off the Micro SD, card formatting it with my phone and then restoring the data seems to have fixed it, must have been a corrupted file-system on the card itself. Anyway, check out my Linux PDF files, I have some cool stuff there for new and experienced Linux users alike. This image I have uploaded, shows what operating systems my visitors are using. As you can see Linux is the clear winner followed by Windows 7 and then Windows XP, which is still clinging to life after more than ten years. When will people stop using that operating system?