Security1; Why is Linux so much more secure than Windows?

One of the formative periods in the early history of UNIX was when it was made freely available to universities around the world. Probably the intention was that a generation of programmers would get to like it while they were students, and then recommend it once they graduated and started work for corporations. A major side effect of UNIX being in universities was that it was exposed early on to an environment very like a mini version of the Internet today: lots of computers networked together, and supposed to do some work for everyone including cleaver mischievous minds. The lessons learned then by UNIX system administrators are now put to use in every system running Linux.

There are various differences between Linux and Windows, and they all give advantages and disadvantages which can be argued about, but there is one single unarguable advantage which Linux has when it comes to security That is that the oper ating system recognises different users have different authorisations. Again this comes from way back when a single computer had to work for a number of users, each logged on from terminals. Universities didn't want students reading the exam papers which the professors were writing on the system, and the system administrators didn't want anyone deleting parts of the operating system. So they built an operating system which limited users to accessing their own files, or files of their workgroup. The idea of separate users is very powerful, even when there will only ever be one user of a PC, because various programs running on the PC can appear to the operating system to be in use by by different users. My Internet servers run a program which sends out pages to browsers making requests. If a client, who is made a member of the same workgroup as the program, makes files readable by members of the workgroup, those files will be readable by the program, so it will send them as pages out to the browser. Files which the client marks as not accessible by the rest of the group, the web server, and other clients cannot read those files. If the program tries to change what is in the clients' files, the operating system will not allow it to, unless the client has set the file to be writable by the workgroup too. I, as the administrator, make sure that this program does not have access to eg. the email program, because it has no need to have access and any attempt it makes to do so will show that it has been tricked by a hacker or virus.

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