That's what the open source geeks want you to believe. Most users (the 6yo and the grandmother listed above) don't want that kind of security because they lose nifty features and have to learn how to use their shiny new computer.
Exactly, that is what I have been trying to get at. Open source has nothing to do with it, unless you want to look through the thousands of lines of code trying to figure out what each does. The people being affected are not going to be doing that. And again, just because the code is open to look at, doesn't mean anyone is.
It is kinda like a car. Most people are never going to open the hood and figure out how and why everything works, and see if any improvements can be made. All they want is to turn it on and have it work.
Another potentially bad thing about open source, under many licenses you are free to modify and distribute the code. If we ever get to the point where open source is dominant, I see a big threat being misleadingly advertised products. Someone takes a good product, enters a few lines of malicious code, and redistributes it under the original name. Grandma and the 6 year old (probably not even me) are not going to look through all the code to make sure that it is right, the only way it is going to be found out about is when it does whatever it is designed to do. Sure, I could MD5 sum it, but honestly, how many people on the internet know what an MD5 is?
I'm not saying that one is better than the other, just that someone saying that one is completely better/safer/securer than the other isn't taking everything into consideration. Simply put, those that know what ther are doing are going to be much more secure with whatever they are using, than someone who doesn't know what they are doing on the most secure system.
A good IE v. Mozilla example. I hit a website that tried to load something on my computer with IE. It made a pop-down box that looked exactly like the Info bar telling me how to disable my security to get this great feature. For the fun of it, I tried it with FireFox. It wasn't the same exact way, but it did tell me exactly how to install this latest and greatest thing that I needed to view that site. With something like that, it doesn't matter how secure the system is, if the person using it isn't smart enough to recognize a threat. Same with the virus outbreaks at the company I co-oped for. Everytime, it was some idiot running an executable that they got. They didn't affect anyone that didn't run it, just the ones stupid enough to realize menaked.jpg.vbs is not a file to try and look at.
