FUD

FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It's a marketing ploy. When your product is only marginally better (or worse) than a competitor's product, you gain a better market share by casting indirect insuations at your competitor's product.

Before I go any further, I don't want to start a religious war here. Anyone who thinks I'm starting a "this OS is better than THAT one" argument will find themselves banned for an indeterminate period of time.

Example: The Lost Olive had a pointer to Reality Check: How Safe is Linux. The article gives the appearance of comparing the security of *nix and Windows. It even describes the usual binaries exploited on a *nix box (Sendmail, FTP, Telnet and Samba), stating that one is notorious for security holes. Anyone see what's missing in the article? How about the Microsoft counterparts for those same services which have the same notoriety? (Hint: Exchange/Outlook, IIS, and NetBIOS)? This only irked me though. It's an old brown substance that will be thrown back and forth across the fence for years.

What prompted me to blog here is the paragraph entitled "Keeping It Simple" which leads you to believe point and click adminstration is more secure than anything else because it's easier to use. I've got news for you Mr. Vincent Ryan, point-and-click administration breeds legions of point-and-click administrators (they don't understand the technology behind the GUI). You end up with administrators who can't read message headers to troubleshoot and think that LDAP is used only for Exchange's address book.

Shame on NewsFactor Network passing it off as news (a special report) rather than slanted Op/Ed.

Dig back through the archives of my previous blog and you'll find a rant about point-and-click administrators.