Slashdot Mirror
Report That OS X Snow Leopard May Include Antivirus
File this firmly in the "rumor" category for now. the JoshMeister writes (in the third person) "Mac antivirus company Intego broke the story this morning that Apple is apparently including antivirus functionality in its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. But which antivirus engine is Apple using? Security researcher Joshua Long discusses the likely candidates."
Personally I use ClamXAV and always have. Mainly because I have a tripple boot system (not that I use much more than OS X, but every once in a while I need to use Windows or Linux for testing something). Because of the fact that there are other operating systems on my box, I wanted an anti-virus in case somehow it could affect the other instances on the system.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I don't think that would help, mad-clickers implicitly trust everything.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Immune? No. Reasonably secure by design, yes.
apparently 1325 followers do. :-/
Safari will do this for installer packages and mount .dmg files if "Open safe files after opening" is enabled.
...and no such thing exists there, this would seem to be completely made up bullshit.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Heck, maybe it's also why Linux virus scanners exist. Besides the oddball Mac trojan, the Mac AV probably keeps up with PC viruses as well. Not because they can run them, but to avoid being a "carrier". If you use the Windows firesharing, many worms seek out the shares. It's possible those worms may find an open Mac share and infect files in there. The Mac won't get infected, but Windows PCs accessing those shares can become infected. Better the Mac catch it and quarantine...
So, we have a Slashdot story speculating about the outcome of a story on another site which uses unknown, and not necessarily reliable source, about a possible feature in an unreleased OS.
Can we please wait until there is real evidence before shouting that the sky's falling please.
Oh, sorry, this is Slashdot! ;-)
As for the article: *IF* it is true, fine! Who cares what anti-virus engine it uses as long as it works and is ready for any dangerous malware which does come along for MacOS?
(And for those who wish to gloat, no OS is fully immune, especially from the security hole at the keyboard. Why does Linux need an anti-virus product like ClamAV?! Linux doesn't have any viruses.... ;-))
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
There's been multiple viruses using failures in the system to install themselves on the apple hardware without any user input.
My favorite is the iphone exploit where somebody could root your device & record everything barely by sending an IM :)
Although some Snow Leopard details may not be available yet, most components of the Mac OS X security architecture pre-date Snow Leopard, and details are available, in places like this... Mac OS X Security Architecture
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You can find reputable OSS programs on Windows and Mac also.
The mac "culture" is much more willing to purchase a $20 app that fills a tidy hole in their system. This is both an emergent behavior and a forced behavior. Forced because the ecosystem for macs is a fraction of that for windows, the number of cracking or hacking groups targeting pay-for apps is much lower. Emergent because, the already high barrier to entry (iTax) is locking out a large amount of those who are inclined to buy a $300 PC and fill it with warez. Both of these factors also work to suppress the creation of an equivalent to the spyware-infested freeware app "scene" present on Windows.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Agreed. I simply feel no need to peddle on warez sites. Open source, freeware as well as low cost payware are abundant enough and fill the gaps for a decently low price. Why take the risk?
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
http://mac.softpedia.com/
http://www.opensourcemac.org/
http://www.macorchard.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/
I've purchased 3 apps since switching to Mac last year. VMWare Fusion, an encoding app, and another to sync my gmail calendars to OS X Mail's calendars. Everything else I've needed has been free via Open Source sites found above. Gimp and OpenOffice handle the other basics. Why would you need warez?
Just a FYI, you can now sync your osx calendar to google via calDav for both read and write. I didn't use iCalendar until I found this out because I wasn't going to buy an app to sync them.