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Mac users 'too smug' Over Security?
wild_berry writes "Bill Thompson, one of the BBC's technology commentators and presenter of Go Digital on the BBC World Service, expresses his concerns that Mac users assume their safety in the face of trojans, worms, keyloggers and other malware. As a Mac user he is most concerned about the lack of herd immunity that is needed to stop a few infections becoming an epidemic, fully explained in his column week for the BBC technology site. Is he right, and what actual products exist for OS X that would protect against infections?"
Well, then tell me why all the virii listed there are either OS9 or Microsoft Office ones?
Indeed, old Macs suffered from security problems -- this is why Apple made the decision to go for a burned ground rewrite. Because they realize that sometimes you can't fix bad design in a milder way.
I'm not a Mac fanboi, hell, I haven't even seen a Mac in my entire life (if porting several pieces of software over ssh doesn't count) -- but I can't remember hearing any unofficial product of the AV industry or their "unconnected" contractors being able to survive in the wild on OS X fruits. Sure, you can pwn users of any OS, but I wouldn't call "please-run-me" trojan as a viable virus.
In other words: Macs are not perfect, but are pretty good. Same applies to *BSD, most Linux distros, Solaris, HP SUX, etc, etc... -- in other words, any major OS made by any company other than Microsoft.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
True, to a point. The open source community is looking at Linux with the specific intent to make it better. There are thousands of people, on the other hand, that are foaming at the mouth (many who also are in the open source community) spending lots of time pouring over Microsoft products, just dying to be the next guy who can say "nyanyanyanyanyanya, Microsoft sucks!" and expose another weakness. The difference is that Linux fundamentally improves feature and stability wise, but not necessarily as much security wise. Sure, bugs are caught, but I assure you, 10000 times the effort is put into finding holes in Microsoft's code. Of course, the logical conclusion of this practice is that eventually, with all the help, Microsoft will truly be a very secure operating system, which is exactly opposite of the intent, I am sure.
My god what a moron you are. Ok so imagine that you, an idiot, is sitting at home writing a virus and he thinks to himself 'well i could write a virus for 95% of the computing market or I could write a virus for the 5% that have never been hacked and become infamous across the web... No wait ill write another virus for that 95%' FFS its not like apple are even low profile anymore, big enough to take potshots at no problem if it were that easy.
Ok you dumb ass, look at what your comment says about patching. Apple releases a lot of security patches AND there are NO viruses, Windows releases less patches AND has MANY many many viruses. So what Apple are relying on security through obscurity? Or maybe they are patching there OS all the time to make sure it stays 100% secure unlike Windows which is at the stage of 'damage control'?
P.P.S. You dont even know how computers work do you? what are you doing here? a mac virus that erases the hard drive? Macs dont even run in root 99% of the time!!!
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
Well, unless you mean to tell us that OS X is bullet proof, and that nothing can cross its security (in which case I'll readily dismiss you as another lunatic), I don't what the point is. I still feel the same attitude around. I'm typing this on a mac, partly because of the influence some of my mac owning friends had over me (or, rather the influence their computers had over me), yet all I see from them is that same attitude. Truth be told, I am, for the time being, content with the results of security by obscurity (neither this laptop nor my linux box are likely targets), but I know for a fact that neither OS is bullet proof, and that the biggest reason no one bothers cracking them is because that wouldn't really get them much attention, or results.
Still, I'm afraid to tell you that Windows's theoretical security model is much more robust than the base Unix system (ACLs versus the muchs simpler owner/group/all permissions), and that the 2 great big problems with windows security are 1. user attitude and 2. bad implementation. I'd consider the former much more grievous than the latter, and I do blame it on Microsoft, for having worked to ensure that everyone still works as administrator at the close of 2005. OS X does promote quite the opposite, the more traditional NIX way (can't really vouch for prior versions) of working as a non-admin user, but that's not really the only thing that matters, is it?