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Apple Says Macs Are Safe, No Antivirus Needed
lobridge writes "Over the last two days multiple news feeds (and Slashdot) have been reporting that Apple has been quietly recommending antivirus software for their machines. It appears now that Apple has deleted an entry on their forums that suggested this and are saying that Mac computers are 'safe out of the box.'"
Nice long post, but you have one MAJOR fallacy included:
Wrong. Totally wrong. Mac antivirus software ONLY scans for W32 viruses as those are the only payloads that there are definitions for. You run that as a dontation of CPU cycles to your clueless Windows running counterparts who can't be bothered to run an OS designed from the ground up for multi-user networked security (like Linux, BSD, or as a result, MacOS)
My Babylon
Hey. If you wiki you will see that there are viruses for Linux (I think the count is 4000ish), and below is a link to at least one Mac virus that I could find on Wikipedia (one search, I am lazy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIR_(computer_virus)
I agree strongly with the sentiment that Antivirus for Linux and MacOS are largely to protect against spreading windows virii
If you pass along an infected e-mail you are spreading a virus that could have stopped with you.
Another point to consider is weaknesses in other applications such as flash, Macoffice, silverlight (wich has a Linux beta) and so on.
OS vulnerability (or lack thereof) is only part of the puzzle.
If you are running apache php and firefox a simple script will crash your whole system regardless of OS.
A simple script along the lines of while $value is less than 1000000000 do value+1 and echo "the value is".$value
(I put in an EXTREMELY simplified version since /. did not want to show the full script, but most of you guys should get the idea)
In fact I embedded it in php and I caused my machine to run out of memory and lock up by simply accessing localhost in firefox. This is on an ubuntu box, running apache and FF with PHP.
If you are creative you can get up to a lot of mischief, regardless of platform.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
below is a link to at least one Mac virus that I could find on Wikipedia (one search, I am lazy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIR_(computer_virus)
I agree strongly with the sentiment that Antivirus for Linux and MacOS are largely to protect against spreading windows virii
If you pass along an infected e-mail you are spreading a virus that could have stopped with you.
The NVIR virus last worked on MacOS 8, it didn't work under MacOS 9 and it certainly doesn't work under Mac OS X. Basically the last operating system it worked on was obsolete over 10 years ago. There are no current Mac OS X viruses in the wild.
In regards to spreading Windows viruses yeah I feel bad for Windows users but I won't spend my own money and processor cycles on worrying about their systems. If they want to protect their systems then they should take steps to protect themselves. They could also dump Windows and get an operating system that isn't so ridden with viruses and malware. That's their own choice and problem, not mine.
Sapere aude!
Does ANYONE RTFA?
Oh, I forgot! This is Slashdot.
Apple pulled the tech note because it was OUTDATED, not because they wanted to "censor" it.
The "real" question is "Why was this a 'story' in the first place?" I believe it was 'planted' by Microsoft, to attempt to derail serious holiday Mac purchasing, by sowing the seeds of FUD.
Show me even ONE true worm-type virus for OS X, and I will entertain the idea that there is something "there".
Until then, it's just disingenuous FUD. (Which I think is the only kind of FUD available)...
fyi, it really is "viruses", not virii.