I noticed that there doesn't seem to be much concern about spyware programs etc. I can't believe that we are immune to such. Can someone enlighten me?

Thankss

The internet tablets aren't Windows machines. There's no need for a virus/spyware scanner as there are none.

Why would someone want to create a virus for an operating system a handful of people use. When there's an entire sea of windows users? The biggest threat to your system. Is you.

This statement is very true with Linux. But don't worry too much. You may crash a program or two if you start tinkering with Linux. But there are many people out there in the Linux community who will help you fix it back to normal if not better.

The second reason not to fear too much spyware is that most of the software we install on our nits is open source. In other terms people smarter then us common users (by smarter I understand better programming experience) can look at the source code and actually tell others that this or that program has built in backdoors or has exploitable bugs.

Another reason is open source development. Have you noticed how often your programs are updated? That is because in open source world if a critical security bug is discovered it gets patched faster than it can be exploited. If in a commercial development environment a bug takes anywhere from weeks to months to get patched in open source world, if we talk about an actively developed software it can take anywhere from hours to a few days. And so before some backdoor can be exploited it is closed. And so hackers are left with only a handful of unprotected (not updated) machines. I don't say that linux in general (and nit in particular) is not hackable. It is. But it is harder, and that combined with the small number of systems compared to windows mobile or symbian doesn't make it an interesting target.