Mr Gralia, I fail to see your reasoned point

Weblog:		Mac's New Slogan: Viruses for the Rest of Us
Subject:		Mr Gralia, I fail to see your reasoned point
Date:		2005-03-23 08:49:49
From:		rmeister0

Nobody with a brain in their head has claimed that OS X (not Macs, but OS X - there is a difference) was immune to viruses. What they have said is that no known virus attacks have occurred in the wild. Given the structure of the core OS, they have also asserted that a successful virus attack would be capable of doing less damage to an OS X box than it would to a windows box. Spyware and adware are, to my mind, more insidious than viruses on Windows. My wife has to clean her computer on a daily basis due to the crap that mere web browsing pulls down to her machine. I have yet to find anything on my OS X boxes that I didn't explicitly put there. Symantec's assertion that hack attacks against OS X will increase is tantamount to saying that the sky is blue. Of course they will! The significant issue is this: Unix-based systems have had over 20 years of serious beating on to work out the security vulnerabilities inherent in the platform; Windows is playing catch up due to it's relative immaturity and the fact that's its code base is constantly evolving. On the flip side, the Mac community has not been very smart about this. Constantly exclaiming immunity to hack attacks is simply waving a red flag at a bull. Somebody is going to pull it off just to prove it could be done - and to have the bragging rights of being the first to do so. But the plain truth is still that the primary vectors for virus infection in Windows (Outlook's handling of attachments, the ability to edit executable files and to execute data files, ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer, etc) are more numerous than in OS X. So while security will never be absolute, would you want a system is slightly secure or reasonably secure?

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Re: Mr Gralia, I fail to see your reasoned point
2005-03-23 10:37:54 brianiac [Reply | View]

Many Apple users are guilty of a kind of iDolatry.

Brainless or no, a large quantity of Mac enthusiasts I have known swear that very thing: complete, inherent immunity to malware. This attitude has frequently been implied or encouraged by uninformed sales people.

Your wife needs to use Firefox, and she likely won't have spyware problems like that anymore.

The sudden defense of Unix from the Mac crowd amuses me nearly as much as when they tout fantastic new features in OS X that have been in Windows for years, but for which they would never have admitted anything positive at the time.

BTW: FreeBSD (Darwin's core) is only about 10-12 years old.

As for a constantly evolving codebase, nothing could be further from the truth! Windows has had to be far more consistently backward-compatible than the Mac has been, historically.

Editing executable files? What does this even mean? Any platform that can't do this doesn't *have* executable files!

Everything else you cite is an argument to use Firefox and Thunderbird, not change OSes.

Re: Mr Gralia, I fail to see your reasoned point
2005-03-24 05:28:23 rmeister0 [Reply | View]

Any person who claims any platform is immune to malware is brainless. Period. It is not true, it has never been true, and it never will be true. It's like the car that never breaks down, or the cloth that never stains.

Unix as a whole has decades of development behind it. In the 1980's it was a popular and common hacker target; the security issues that plagued it were addressed, slowly and over time, but have been addressed.

Windows is in that position today. It will probably be a much more secure OS in about 5-10 years, but it is not there now. And now is the problem.

Before OS X I wouldn't touch a Mac with a 10 foot pole. The OS was mired in late 80's design and lacked the things that really, truly mattered - proper memory protection and multitasking just to name two. NT 4 was far ahead of the Mac in nearly every way that mattered to the IT shop.

I stand by my statement about Window's evolving code base, which has nothing to do with backwards compatibility. The amount of cruft that has accumulated from 3.1 to 98 to 98 to ME is enormous; Only once hitting 2000 and the unified driver model did some of the crap finally go. But there's still plenty there, and it just continues to grow. Only now, in the last two years, did Micosoft sit up and say "we gotta deal with this security thing".

"Any platform that can't do this doesn't *have* executable files". OS/400.

You seem convinced that the browser is the problem. The browser is only one part of the total security issue.

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