Another silly question

[Michael Torrie]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 19:44, Jim wrote:
> Hello
> I visited my father in-law over the weekend and I he needed some help 
> with his pc.
> I removed a lot of spyware that was on his pc,he runs winblows xp.
> Now do we Linux people have to worry about spyware when we run Linux?

I would just say, "no," but I think it's a bit more complicated than
that.  The same factors that make it very hard for viruses to propagate
on linux (the strong separation between root and a normal user, no ms
outlook) also would make it harder for spyware to get in on Linux. 
Definitely not impossible, but certainly we wouldn't have web pages
exploiting security flaws in the browser to install payload.  Spyware
could still be embedded in apps, though, and there have been rumors that
Real Player spied on users in some way.  These things could still happen
on linux, but so far I haven't heard of any yet.  But it's not
impossible.

Michael


> Jim
> 
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-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem@chem.byu.edu>