[wellylug] Opensouce "infectious" and should be "Quarantined" - NZ Government..

[Jim Cheetham]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 10:08:17AM +0100, Gerald Roehrbein wrote:
> Second it have had a built in Virus in it's BIOS.

BIOS "anti-virus" feature only checks for changes to the boot sector of
the disk, and usually checks it to make sure it's pure Microsoft code.
> 
> In Germany the Bavarian government does not like to use Microsoft
> software because a lot of components of the Microsoft OS are built by
> companies related to scientology ruled companies (Rob Hubbard). They use
> Linux.

Therefore they should also dislike Open Source, because if anyone from
the Church of Scientology contributed code to their software, it would
not be disclosed (or worth comment). For example, some of the core
freedoms of Debian are :-

http://www.debian.org/social_contract
> No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of
> persons.
> 
> No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor 
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
> specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program
> from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

> Nobody should attach a production environement direct or indirect to the
> world wide web because a firewall from a company have any time one port
> free to forward internal informations to anybody:

If your production systems are not even indirectly attached to the
Internet, they cannot be used at all :-)
> 
> PORT 80 and HTTP protocol.

Hence you use an HTTP proxy facility in your firewall. If you set your
environment up "correctly", the proxy will not pass any request inwards
unless it is completely valid - i.e. it refers to a URL that is allowed
to be published.

I agree that just blocking unused ports is absolutely pointless - if
they are really unused, the incoming connection would fail even if there
were no firewall :-)

-jim