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Comment by memoryfault | Hacker News Reader

Security in software is relative. Everything is vulnerable. If someone wants to hack into Google's super-secret data and Google is running Linux or Mac OS X, then the hackers will find exploits in that software. This article is a joke for implying that this switch will in any way make them more secure.

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If they're using Linux, they can find and patch the vulnerability immediately. They could even have a team hunting through the source code looking for vulnerabilities to patch.

On Windows, they would have to report the vulnerability to Microsoft, and hope that it's patched soon. It probably would be, but that's still an extra step - and they wouldn't be able to locate it with reference to the code. Also, as another person mentioned, china has access to the Windows source code; Google doesn't. This evens the playing field.

but this was rumored to be a zero-day attack, which means nobody knew about the exploit so it was as-of-yet unpatched. even if they we're running goobuntu with the full capability of patching the source and deploying fixes, a zero-day attack would have made it through in the beginning. switching operating systems is not going to secure against zero-day attacks.

Just imagine all their machines were running debian linux with the wrongly patched openssl binary. About 1024 different private/public keys to rule them all :-)

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