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Apple Usurps Oracle As the Biggest Threat To PC Security
AmiMoJo writes: According to data from Secunia, Apple's software for Windows is now the biggest threat to PC security, surpassing previous long term champion Java. Among U.S. users, some 61 percent of computers detected running QuickTime did not have the latest version. With iTunes, 47 percent of the installations were outdated versions. There were 18 vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime 7 at the time of the study. Oracle has now fallen/risen to 2nd place, followed by Adobe. All three vendors bundle automatic updater utilities with their software, but users seem to be declining new versions. Update fatigue, perhaps?
Valid question. I used to install Quicktime... 4? On my Pentium 2 MMX 200mhz computer back in the mid 1990's so I could watch movie trailers on Apple's website in middle school. That's the last time I installed Quicktime that I can remember. I'm honestly curious what purpose it serves today? Is it a web browser plugin or what? I haven't even thought of Quicktime in YEARS.... let alone had a reason to use it...
My understanding is that versions of iTunes prior to 10.5 required Quicktime. Quicktime has always been more than a video player -- it's an entire multimedia framework, with APIs for doing a whole host of multimedia playback, editing, and conversion capabilities. It was the main multimedia framework for Mac OS X up until 10.7 (Lion).
iTunes would have used it for both media playback, as well as for transcoding video from various formats/sizes for various Apple devices (iPhone, AppleTV, etc.). Newer versions no longer require Quicktime so far as I'm aware -- however, this article is about people who aren't keeping their software up-to-date, so it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they're still running older OS's and older versions of iTunes.
Yaz
Plus we're tired of being tricked into accidentally downloading unwanted virusscanners (flash), toolbars (java), and whatever other crap they want to bundle. We are tired of running two dozen automatic update tools at all times, all fighting for internet access and all using memory and CPU time. Sure, it's very little and it mostly ends up in swap anyways - but it adds up. And we are certainly tired of having to deal with that crap every time we boot the machine.
It's a great mystery to me why Windows does not have a unified update service (like Windows Update, but also including tools from 3rd parties). It doesn't even have to go through Microsofts servers - just let programs register their own server with the update service, and then let the update service do updates at times when it is convenient to me.
I've solved at least part of this problem by simply not having QuickTime or Java installed. Flash is installed, but only runs on demand (which is actually far less often than you'd imagine). Windows Update I've shut down after Microsoft started pushing spyware and adware as "important updates". So now I run a risk of "hackers". So far they've proven less of a nuisance than actual vendors...
From TFS, the biggest infection vector isn't "Apple", it is simply users who have failed to update.
Clickbait nonsense. Dice. But I repeat myself.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.