Re: Antivirus? (and firewalls)

["Marc Rubin, Jay's Island Software Development & Consulting" <mrubin@iname.com>]

Lee wrote:
>The best thing we can do is to educate
>people about the dangers of running as root.

Agreed, but all too many programs -must- be run as root, or at least be
given root privileges. As distributions become more user-friendly, the boost
in popularity is likely to attract twisted minds to create more native Linux
viruses, worms, and trojan horses. 

Along with native virus scanning software, I wonder if it would be practical
to create a software "sandbox" in which to test potentially malicious
programs? They would be allowed to run as root, but certain system calls
would be intercepted. 


>If we could make a GUI for IPchains, and make it easy, 
>it would be something that would get a lot of good
>publicity for us.

In a review of firewall software, I read that having all the rules visible
in one window made one program especially easy to use. Have Inde developers
settled on a particular programming language GUI front ends? 

I've been working with Java for a few years, but found that the installation
process for JDKs under Linux had some undocumented quirks. Perhaps
installing just the runtime would be easier. Anyway, has anyone tried
writing utilities for Inde in Java? The portability can really leverage a
developer's time & energy. 


>Go to http://www.enteract.com/~lspitz/pubs.html

A great lead, thanks.
Marc                              

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