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Intel Head Recommends Apple
pboulang writes "noted in this
article in the WSJ:
Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else.""
Maybe Apple is going to use intel hardware...
It's already been speculated upon, although not confirmed by either party.
As for Linux, it's a damn good OS, very stable and you've gotta love the OSS ideal. Regular home users, however are either not willing or not able (I'm really not sure which) to use it - that's changing, but in terms of a literally plug and play solution that's out there right now you can't beat a Mac Mini.
And he doesn't use any of the wide number of free spyware prevention and automatic removal tools because?
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
"An hour. Seriously? I don't know if I've spent an hour /total/ removing spyware."
Well i work for a fair sized company i would say that a typical mywebsearch, comet cursor, 180solutions, screensaver inc, etc spyware infection takes about 20 minutes to disinfect.
for this i would be using
hijack this
spybot search and destroy
and the microsoft anti spyware
Oh and the most important thing is to do it from SAFE MODE with network. I would recomend installing and running all those tools from safe mode. This includes downloading the updates. The only exception would be the microsoft one since it needs WMI to install which does not work in safemode.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
People who complain about these things are indeed too stupid to use a computer, or simply ignorant, in which case using an operating system that is not so massively targeted will work better for them.
OS X does not automatically increase people's IQ by a 100 points, despite claims to the contrary.
Just wait until there's Gator and Super Cursors (or whatever) for OS X. Then we'll see what the difference is between Windows and other operating systems. If the only thing standing between malware and some kid's computer is a dialog asking the root password then I'm really not inclined to feel any safer.
Security is not a product, it's a state of mind.
Darwin is based on BSD, not Linux.
You haven't seen just how bad spyware infections can get. Trust me, an hour can easily be spent removing the most persistent infections.
I do think that this guy should educate his daughter and take some preventive measures though. A hosts file that blocks known bad sites and an immunization feature from an antispyware program should help immensely.
That's why OS X gives those files to the root account, and will only delete them if the user has administrative access and provides a password to do it.
This isn't exactly like having root access, but it's pretty close. It allows you to sudo -s and become root whenever you want, but remain a regular user the rest of the time.
If you go into the System folder and start deleting (or moving, renaming, whatever) things, you're immediately required to authenticate and become root in order to do it. No password, no deleting.
Although I'm not too familiar, I imagine that someone with root/administrator access on a Windows box can similarly screw things up with a few well-chosen deletions. Let's face it: any modern computer has to store critical files somewhere on the drive, and any decent operating system is going to have a way to let superusers modify them. If you let idiot users become root or Administrators, they're going to screw things up.
Stupidity is platform-independent, I'm afraid.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Umm, No.
Any windows machine can become compromised quite easily via Messenger, Media Player, Outlook, Explorer, and any other program that uses COM/ActiveX/ASP. It's trivial to become admin under windows once a program is running.
Show me what OS stops the root account from being able to trash their system...
Try SELinux. Once setup, root can't destroy the system.
Your one of the lucky ones. Most Windows users are not. You need to read up on Windows internals to see how vunerable you really are.
For your "if Apple had a Windows-sized market share it would have Windows-sized problems" comment: I will respond with - /. in general.
standard_reply_1 -- Apache blah blah Windows blah blah, larger marketshare DOES NOT IMPLY more problems. Configuring a system intelligently does a lot to prevent many problems from ever becoming an issue. For more details I refer you to every 8th post in this thread, as well as every 20th post on
...as well as:
standard_reply_2 -- The Mac OS is configured to prevent a user from being able to install malware. It is configured to prevent connections from the big bad internet. It has a firewall in place and configured out of the box. You have to enter a root password to install anything. It is not perfect, but by being set up correctly at the outset they have guaranteed that in your marketshare reversal scenario, the Mac users would as a whole, be in better shape than the current crop of Windows folken. By default, your average Mac internet user is already non-privileged and firewalled. That's what we're trying to get Windows users to please please please start doing!
Now a higher marketshare does imply that more effort would be spent on finding Mac exploits, and I fully grant that in turn would create more problems than we have now. But I feel you overstated your case. There is a lot of terrain between "worse than Macs now" and "as bad as Windows now."
And for your distinction between the kernels of NT/OSX/*nix vs. the end user environment: You're doing a little bit of a strawman there. Windows does not allow for you to pull out many of the "extras" and so making a claim that Windows without a browser would be as secure as OSX without a browser is a bit disingenuous. A large part of the security problems plaguing Windows rely on the ability of (eg.) your browser to touch things that a browser ought never to touch.
You made a very good point, however, that Mac users check for updates with less frequency and less urgency than Windows now requires. And as market share increases, yeah, Mac users will have to adapt somewhat. While ease of the updates is a bonus for Macs, the timeline of bugfixes and the average mean time to clicking "software update" both need to mature as Mac OSX takes over your city, county, state, country, world, mwa-hah, hah-ha, hah. Ha ha.
Sorry, almost got out of control there.
nonsense.
on simpler linux OSes, such as ubuntu, debian and mandrake, you can either donwnload the package and install it (though ubuntu doen't yet feature a graphical fronted for this method), or you can just find them in your respiratory, without manually downloading anything or weeding your way through anything (though again, on ubuntu you'd probably have to know how to enable universe, but that's a 1-time easy job).
so while for some times macs can install more easily, the difference isn't as drastic as you make it seem.
My new blog
os x = i would recommend it to my mother, who once admitted to not knowing how to turn the computer on.
/', or anything moronic like that.
windows = sucks. period. as an operating system, i had my reservations against it. as a programmer, it haunts my dreams.
linux = not always that hard to set up, you just have to choose the right distro. oh and yes, free...
and in response to the earlier post, there is nothing stopping a single user from creating an administrator account at installation, and choosing to use another account for their day to day computer activities - most distributions recommend it during the install process. that way you don't have to worry about accidentally typing 'rm -rf
You're either doing this as a joke, cause you saw the last post, or you're doing it again.
It's "voila", not "volia".
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
The comment reads:
An hour each week?
First, if you read the article, he is hardly recommending Apple. Second,
"He spends an hour a weekend removing spy ware from his daughter's computer."
Wow, is he the last person to have heard of 'Search and Destroy' or even MS's new anti-spy ware programs? Is it really a good sign that his daughter can't keep the computer clean? If she is old enough to browse the sites that have a lot of spy ware on them (an hours worth of work every week), she should be old enough to do something about it. If not, they should have some parental controls (won't fix it, but will help). Firefox anyone?
Anonymous ROT13 karma whor
The translation was obtained here, and the details on the ridiculous encryption method is available from the Wiki. It's a Caesar Cipher, and about as difficult to break as reading "HAL" as "IBM" in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Did you try just plugging it in and using iPhoto? Both of my cameras (Canon and Fuji) work without any drivers. My Sony DV camera works with out any drivers either, just plug into the Firewire port.
I do find it amazing that he didn't say "no, no, no... WinTel is the _only_ way to go". However, I would hardly call what he said as being an recommendation for Apple, Linux, Solaris or any other non MS Windows product. He basically is saying, "hey, if you don't want to deal with spyware, adware and viruses, your going to have to look at something other than MS Windows". I don't think that is telling us anything new. The whole freakin world knows that, yet the majority of the masses stick with the MS Crap(tm). Maybe Jane and Joe Six-Pack like spyware, adware and viruses?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
That depends.
If the house has a major vulnerability like doors with NO LOCKS, or windows with no glass, it is clearly the former.
If they bust a window or a door and get in, it is a case of the latter.
Linspire doesn't have you running as root, and neither did Lindows.
I just replaced my old Audigy (which has hardware mixing) with a new 'pro-sumer' style envy24-based M-audio Audiophile 2496.
Superior in most respacts, but doesn't support hardware mixing. (I'll probably put the audigy back in and use both of them simulaniously.. Alsa rocks)
Most cheaper cards don't support it either. Most onboard cards.. which is what most people end up using.
The soundblaster/audigy line of cards do make very good linux cards and are cheap.
funny, if i remember correctly, something like 3/4ths of the chips intel manufactures are not x86 processors. intel is no more dependent on microsoft than microsoft is on intel.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Actually the commodore 64 had a lot of viruses from what I remember. It attached itself on each floppy you inserted.
But in those days you didn't lose 160 GB of data.
I don't have a firewall other than what comes with my Mac
Me too. And I am running Windows.
I have NEVER spent a nickel on anti-malware programs of any kind.
Me too. I use Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's Adware, both free.
A good consumer computer should be secure out of the box, like a Mac generally is.
Windows is secure out of the box. The problem is that bugs allow buffer overflow exploits, not that the security model of Windows is flawed. Try the latest XP edition, that comes with SP2 and NX-bit enabled: you can't hack into the box.
Should a consumer have those install those themselves?
Doesn't the user have to install newest versions of MacOS X by himself/herself?
If she had a Mac and did not know the admin password, she could not screw up the entire computer
That's also true for non-adminstrator accounts of Windows.
If MS and all the other computer makers were held liable in court for their crapware, the way car makers and makers of most other CONSUMER goods are
You are doing a foundamental mistake here: computer programming is not like car making, bridge building and other engineering activities. There has not been a programming theory that allows completely safe programs. The difference with hardware design is that it is essentially the same again and again for each specific type of item constructed, whereas in software a programmer builds a bridge one day, then a car, then an airport, then a rocket...software makers can't be held responsible for not obeying non-existent laws.
Windows is crappy software from a software-engineering point of view: its APIs suck big time, Win32 does not have an object model, MFC sucks, VB sucks (.NET is just bearable), but one thing that Windows can't be blamed for is the design of the security model: it's much more complex than Unix, much more sophisticated, but no one has hacked it yet; bugs that allow exploits don't count, because they are not a software design problem, but a software industry problem (that allows using unsafe languages like C to program critical stuff; Unix also has had its fair share of failures: remember the Unix worm?).