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Apple to Fix Security Holes in Jaguar
Simon Cozens writes "Yesterday's unsubstantiated report that Apple is refusing to supply security upgrades to Jaguar turns out to be untrue; Apple told MacCentral they will be fixing the bugs turned up by @stake. Next conspiracy, please!"
I just go on Apple's past performance. After OSX 10.2 was released out there were still security updates released for 10.0/10.1
After OSX 10.2 was released, actually, there were even updates for MacOS 9.
Apple's past record for support of older systems is a stronger indication of their intent than the ramblings of any site, publication or group of users.
Wrong. The people they would've left behind are NOT the people who just bought Panther, it's the people with Jaguar and earlier, which came out many months ago.
The initial security advisories did include a "vendor response" section. Across the board that said "upgrade to 10.3", without any mention of a forthcoming patch for earlier releases.
That's the only thing that had Bugtraq up in arms: the lack of assurance that earlier versions would see a patch. And most of the people worried about that were worried because they want Apple to suceed as a Unix vendor, not because they want to see it crash and burn. (I don't know about the Slashdot comments, because I only read more than the highest rated couple of comments when I've got moderator points, but I'd guess that at least some of them were along the same lines.)
I don't know if it was merely a typographical oversight, or if Apple really didn't have any plans to release patches for earlier releases. In the first case they should have been more clear initially (and now they will), in the latter case they were making a huge mistake. I'm inclined to believe it's the former.
This is not the first time that Apple's security PR has been less than impeccable. They've rebounded pretty well each time, and I haven't seen them make the same mistake twice.
It's only reasonable to expect them to get harshly criticized, especially with Mac OS X: they're jumping from a very soft, easy-going market (desktop publishing and education) into an insanely security-conscious market (Unix enterprise servers). They're actually doing quite well, but there are still more entrance pains to come. The security community is, to an extent, xenophobic, and certainly disinclined to believe that a vendor with a relatively small amount of experience in the market can be relied upon to do the right thing. So Apple has to prove themselves a bit. So far, they're doing pretty well. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes like this, as long as you admit to them, patch things up, and then don't keep making them (hey Microsoft, you listening here?).
And Apple really is doing a good job: I've seriously considered bringing Mac OS X (and the related hardware) in as a replacement for aging Sun hardware running Solaris. Sun seems to be falling apart, and (especially with the G5) Apple seems to be a reasonable replacement in the mid-range compute + high I/O line of work without the vendor/service problems you get from Linux (which isn't so hot on the I/O front, since it's hampered by the IA32 architecture's crappy I/O design... other architectures don't matter, because Red Hat doesn't support them commercially).
Do you have a
machine(1)
Description
The machine command displays the machine type.
double bullshit for "i386"
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
So you admit you are wrong.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck