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Windows vs Mac Security
sdhorne writes "There is a good technical discussion over at InfoWorld on the merits of launchd and what is lacking in a comparable Windows secure solution. It is a throw back to the UNIX vs Windows security discussion that has been hashed out for many years." From the article: "it always traces back to Microsoft's untenable policy of maintaining gaps in Windows security to avoid competing with 3rd party vendors and certified partners. Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through .Mac, and launchd. Pretty soon any debate with Microsoft over security can be ended in one round when Apple stands up, says 'launchd', and sits back down."
Macs are based on UNIX. It's not faked to appear like UNIX, it is actually UNIX. The permissions system means that a common virus could damage a user's home directory, but the system for the most part would remain unaffected, including other users. It is still possible to write root-kit style viruses that take advantages of subtle bugs in the operating system and other software to gain control of the system, but this is significantly more complicated to do, and IIRC it was Theo from the OpenBSD project who said that attacks like this require many steps that often must take advantage of many vulnerabilities to elevate priviledges, and by fixing even one bug, a whole category of vulnerabilities (even if other bugs remain) becomes inaccessible to a would-be attacker. This, in addition to much of the code underlying OS X being available for hacking up by anybody, in addition to other projects actually hacking on this code (improvements from projects like Samba, Apache, GCC, FreeBSD, even various Linux projects, make it into Darwin and OS X.... and most of all the fact that users don't run as administrators, all of these reasons make it much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows.
being offered as a "reason why OS X is more secure than Windows."
The article claims that Administrator on Windows is equivalent to root; and that SYSTEM is more powerful than Administrator (and by implication more powerful than root). This is nonsense.
Administrator is indeed less powerful than SYSTEM. However, Administrator is equivalent to a user on the sudoers list and/or with group write access to system directories. SYSTEM is the correct equivalent to root.
We may quibble about how well Administrator accounts are protected from trojans; or whether non-Administrator accounts on Windows are of much use; those are valid arguments. However, claiming that, somehow, SYSTEM on Windows is magically more capable than root is ridiculous.
If anything, Windows has a somewhat better design in that it is possible to set up privileged accounts with a specific power that only root has on UNIX, yet not have any of the other root powers. However, this capability is quite underutilized, and in many ways is undermined by other (unfortunate) decisions that Microsoft made.
It depends on how they offered it. If they made it impossible to uninstall, then yes, we would yell monopoly. However, if they made these features able to be uninstalled (or never installed in the first place) and easily replaced by third party tools, then I don't think we would have anything to complain about. I don't have any problems with MS including IE with the operating system, I just wish it could be removed from the system.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm not sure that 're-invented' is how I'd describe windows, or their efforts at security.
In the past Microsoft have commented that they have completely ditched the code Windows was written with and re-written from ground up, to try to address myriad flaws. That's pretty drastic. I've done it with small projects which simply grew too large and unwieldy because they were never expected to scale to newer demands* Microsoft is effectively doing this with Vista and yet... there still appear to be security flaws. Something wrong with that picture. Could be they're just a victim of their success and such a massive undertaking of code is approaching the event horizon just before the black hole.
*You know the type.. you develop some nifty little tool to summarise information for your own use and someone sees it and says, "Hey! That thing does in seconds what I spend a week doing! I need it, set me up with it!" Next thing you know your little tool has to be user friendly, go to printers, be in colour, etc. Continually piling in changes makes it fragile so you step back, figure what it all needs to do and how to achieve the goals and then recode, with an eye toward more scalibility and unforeseen features later.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But at the same time Apple gets applauded for rolling EVERY SINGLE LITTLE POSSIBLE THING into their OS?
Because they don't force you to use any of it. You can delete any of the utilities that you want. Don't want ichat? Trash it.
On the other hand, good luck getting rid of Windows Messenger. It's even hidden in Add/Remove Programs and fixing that requires a hack well beyond most users.
Don't want to use Safari? Make it go poof.
On the other hand, you CANNOT get rid of Internet Explorer. And that's bad. IE is full of security holes and you can't get rid of it. Safari is far safer, and you can get rid of it.
What hypocrisy was that, again? There's a damn good reason MS gets blasted and Apple doesn't. (Well, it does, but nowhere near as much, and I just explained why.)
i am a soviet space shuttle