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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.