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Study Recommends Mac OS X as Safest OS
rocketjam writes "The British security firm mi2g has concluded a comprehensive 12-month study to identify the safest 24/7 computing environment. In the end, the open source BSD and Mac OS X came out on top with the fewest security breaches against permanently connected machines worldwide in homes, small businesses, large enterprises and governments. The study found Linux to be the most breached environment 'in terms of manual hacker attacks overall and accounts for 65.64% of all breaches recorded'. Windows was the most breached environment in government computing and led Linux, BSD and Mac OS X by far in economic damage caused by breaches." We mentioned their previous study too. As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.
What's a virii?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The two state troopers provide more defense. The Berlin wall was not built for defence, but for imprisonment.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Maybe, just maybe he's using the halfbakery's Use Bizarre Metaphors
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
I would explain the comparison, but I wouldn't want to use words that people can't relate to.
As it is entirely possible that one of my readers may not be able to read English or be familiar with any world events that were not seen on "Survivor" or "The Simple Life", it would be entirely unfair of me to say anything.
Huh? I'm not the cock gobbler that used the nonsense-word virii.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I've attempted to move some web sites over to an OSX system, and it was a disaster for a reason that they never warn you about: OSX comes with a caseless file system. This means that if some directory contains files "foobar" and "Foobar", "fooBar" and "FooBar", when you scp or rsync them over to OSX, you get only one of those names, the first one encountered, and it contains the data of the last one encountered. This is inevitably a disaster.
;-). The main answers that I got were far from helpful.
/usr/bin find program when it wanted the "Find" program in its own directory).
I asked about this in a number of fora (including this one, but you can probably imagine how effective that was
The main answer was that Apple also supports a "unix" file system that is case sensitive. That's fine if you control the server and can reformat the disk and reinstall everything. If not, it doesn't help at all. And you have to face the vague, non-specific warnings that some unlisted number of Apple apps won't work right with the unix file system. There's also the question of whether the disk might be partitioned into two file systems, one case-sensitive and one not. This might be doable, but in over a year, I haven't stumbled across instructions on how to do it.
The other main answer was of the form "You're an 1D10T!" if you have files whose names differ only in capitalization. Well, maybe I am. But if you're getting the files from other systems, you can't necessarily dictate the file-naming rules. And many English-speaking people routinely use case for a number of purposes that make perfect sense in file names, so it's not really correct to say that things shouldn't be case sensitive. We all know the difference between buying an apple and buying an Apple, after all.
The whole thing was frustrated by the inordinately long time that it took to diagnose the reason for the bizarre misbehavior of some of the things in our ported web sites. The symptoms were never indicative of the real problem (e.g., an app execing the
Telling victims of this kind of problems that it's because they're stupid does not endear you to the people figthing the problems. In our case, we eventually reached a firm conclusion: Don't even attempt to move web sites over to OSX. It's probably fine if you are building a web site from scratch and aren't importing anything from anywhere else. But OSX is its own pocket universe with some "interesting" file-system characteristics. Porting to OSX often appears easy at first, until you find yourself going crazy tracking down something like this.
Maybe eventually some OSX guru will write a HOWTO explaining just how to solve this problem. Meanwhile, I'd suggest extreme care with using OSX as part of your server farm.
And I wouldn't expect a real HOWTO to be produced soon. The OSX world is, un fortunately, infested with the attitude that you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about it; it "just works". When it doesn't, you'll find the help not nearly as helpful as in the rest of the unix universe.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.