Everyone deserves anonymity, but none of us get it
Um, you can actually PAY for some of these services and not be tracked. Heck, google gives you a free web browser and then lets you opt out of ALL of its info-gathering.
People deserve what they are willing to pay for. The people have spoken, they want free services, not anonymous services.
I don't think people understand how much information companies like Google have on its users.
Google has a link to what they gather on every page. They make it ridiculously easy to pick up shop and move to another service.
Are you seriously complaining that most people dont care enough to click "about" or "privacy policy" or "terms" on gmail? If they dont care-- and this with magazines like Time claiming "Google wants to own your mind"-- why on earth do you need to care for them.
Which is why that term is a misnomer, and the only "OSX enterprise users" are the ones who have forced their subordinates to hook an OSX system into the rest of the system (at least in my experience, apologies if youve actually built a secure and productive "enterprise" on macs).
Windows machines can be pretty secure on their own too, but once hooked up to an active directory domain they are only as secure as the weakest point...
More accurately, they are only as secure as the Group Policies that force them to the same standard that is set on the server.
You dont have weak workstations on an AD network, just weak policies.
If you read the article, and remember that meteorites are bits of rock that have fallen to earth, this is by no means conclusive-- the most accurate description appears to be the Slashdot Headline ("Building-Blocks-of-DNA-Confirmed-In-Meteorites"). They did test the surrounding area for similar molecules and did not find any, but the article does not state whether such material is found anywhere on earth, or how old the meteorites were, or where they were found.
So Im not clear on how the possibility that it is simply contamination is being ruled out, simply because they "checked against the surrounding area" (which again raises questions-- how big an area, how did they check, etc).
The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.
Im not sure quite whats wrong with the middle of that sentence, but it seems wrong-- shouldnt it be "and saw"?
There appears to be a lot more to his complaint, such as
Cooley registrar's office personnel and professors are known to prolong or refuse to give letters of good standing and recommendations to students seeking to leave-like blocking a professional swimmer wearing a life jacket from jumping off the Titanic
He also indicates an incredibly high attrition rate, and a very low bar passage rate. In other words, youre likely to flunk out, and if you dont, youre still unlikely to pass the bar. That does sound like a rather awful university. I think he cited 60% attrition rate and 40-50% bar passage rate (so 15-20% of people who enter the school will actually be able to practice).
So your argument is that Macs are unsafe because they allow you to run Flash? Sure, as long as you stop complaining when Steve Jobs says how buggy and unsafe Flash is. Big chance, ehh?
So long as people blame Windows for Adobe's vulnerabilities, I will continue to point out that thats neither Microsoft's fault nor an area where Macs are safer.
Thats fine, and not terribly suprising. Win7 is two years old, to tell me that a OS that is less than a month old has newer and better features is what one would expect.
You misunderstand me if you think I am saying OSX sucks (though I certainly am not willing to pay the premium for it); Im saying that I dont think Windows is anywhere near as awful as people are trying to paint it, and that with enough incentive the Mac viruses will start rolling out. However clever the OSX coders were, they made some mistakes, and somewhere out there are blackhats every bit as clever focused on trying to find holes in the most popular systems.
That may be; time will tell. But I remain convinced that whether or not it is slightly harder to hack an OS becomes irrelevant when there is money involved; the most important thing is to have least-privilege in place so the resulting infection is easier to clean.
So yeah, the fact that Macs keep "winning" Pwn2Own proves that Windows is attacked more. Not that its safer.
A LARGE majority of the attacks on windows are from 3rd party, cross platform browser plugins. Explain to me why Mac would be safer than windows, this being the case.
If you were doing it would you go after the Crap $800 dell running windows or the juicy $1600 Macbook Pro.
That was the ENTIRE point of my post. It was sort of an analogy, if you will-- Imagine the windows marketshare as the juicy Macbook Pro. Which are you going to target, as a hacker? Which will you spend all of your time trying to get?
And the second point I was making is that when Mac share becomes big enough, it doesnt seem like it will be an issue to exploit macs.
You seem not to understand what you have to do in Pwn2Own. You have to gain full "arbitrary code execution" and "filesystem access" rights on the system being attacked with nothing more than a link. No user interaction except for clicking a link is allowed.
Read the quoted example again-- your numbers "2" and "3" are notably absent. You arent allowed to have the user run.dmg files or.sh files; that would sort of defeat the entire purpose of Pwn2Own.
That is, if they added one of these sorts of links to google's AdWords, they could begin infecting Macs immediately.
Compare that to MS servers sitting in a room somewhere minding their own business with absolutely no human interaction. They get hacked if you just wait long enough.
Er, thats utterly untrue. All of Microsoft.coms stuff runs on Windows; all their email on Exchange. It is not possible to just "hack" a Windows server, unless you count bruteforcing a completely unsecured server running with a weak password and Remote Desktop enabled (which it is not, by default). Depending on your windows edition, the first step you are instructed to do is "secure your system", and until you click "OK", all incoming ports are blocked.
You really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about; can you please explain to me how youre going to hack Windows servers with no interaction whatsoever, and RDP disabled?
That old saw about Microsoft being vulnerable because of its market share is hog wash. There were over 3 million viruses and Trojans released last year. Were it a simple matter of market share percentages than about 12% of those would be Linux [osnews.com] viruses and another 10-15% would be Mac viruses. But, they are not. Well over 99% of them are Windows viruses. Only 19% of Internet web servers are running Windows but they are the source of essentially all malware.
Logic fail. If there is an 80% chance that you will make $100 by wearing blue on mondays, and this is public knowledge, what percentage of people do you think will wear blue on mondays? 80%, or all of them?
Blaming Windows users for security holes that Microsoft keeps secret from them is worse than obscene.
And trying to pretend that most exploits arent through cross platform browser plugins is just ignorant.
Those inflated virus numbers probably also include the fact that viruses are recompiled and repacked daily-- and thus need a different virus definition to detect. How, you might ask, can they afford to do that? Because theres MONEY involved.
Last-- you can always tell when someone doesnt know diddly about viruses when they start referring to "the number of viruses". Its irrelevant, an infection is an infection, and Macs can get infected by arbitrary code as easily as windows can.
Malware writers would quite happily release malware for OSX if they could make it work
History disagrees.
In the first [Pwn2Own] contest, Dino A. Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay worked together to take down the first MacBook Pro.[5] On the second day of the conference Macauley sent an email which redirected the user to a malicious site. The site was able to infect the machine with a client-side Javascript vulnerability which allowed arbitrary command execution.[6]
Each subsequent year isnt much better.
And why so smug anyways, Safari is already exploited on windows, as are Firefox, Quicktime, Java, Acrobat reader, and Flash-- all of which are usually installed and vulnerable on Macs (unless you think that PDFs somehow arent as dangerous on OSX).
Wasnt there a story some months back about a PDF that could launch arbitrary code on all 3 common platforms (OSX, Linux, Windows)? Yea, enjoy your smugness while it lasts.
If the user is willing to do anything the app or websites tells them to, well, you can't protect them.
Reading up on Pwn2Own results, and reading the security update notes on major browsers / flash / acrobat would prove really informative. Most of the viruses Ive seen are not from incompetent users.
In the first contest, Dino A. Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay worked together to take down the first MacBook Pro.[5] On the second day of the conference Macauley sent an email which redirected the user to a malicious site. The site was able to infect the machine with a client-side Javascript vulnerability which allowed arbitrary command execution
In the 2008 contest, a successful exploit of Safari caused Mac OS X to be the first OS to fall in a hacking competition....
Er, I wasnt saying corps are awesome, Im saying OP is retarded because corporations will always be the ones who enable you to go online. Opensource works because copying bits is free; but making hardware, laying fiber, laying coax, and running datacenters all cost money and will always be run by for-profit corporations.
Who owns the satellites in your suggestion? Who makes the wifi technology?
Railing against all corporations as "need to go away" is retarded, because everything that enables you to post online (screens, keyboard, nics, etc) are made by corporations, and this isnt going to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone deserves anonymity, but none of us get it
Um, you can actually PAY for some of these services and not be tracked. Heck, google gives you a free web browser and then lets you opt out of ALL of its info-gathering.
People deserve what they are willing to pay for. The people have spoken, they want free services, not anonymous services.
I don't think people understand how much information companies like Google have on its users.
Google has a link to what they gather on every page. They make it ridiculously easy to pick up shop and move to another service.
Are you seriously complaining that most people dont care enough to click "about" or "privacy policy" or "terms" on gmail? If they dont care-- and this with magazines like Time claiming "Google wants to own your mind"-- why on earth do you need to care for them.
That is a bit troubling for OS X enterprise users
Which is why that term is a misnomer, and the only "OSX enterprise users" are the ones who have forced their subordinates to hook an OSX system into the rest of the system (at least in my experience, apologies if youve actually built a secure and productive "enterprise" on macs).
Windows machines can be pretty secure on their own too, but once hooked up to an active directory domain they are only as secure as the weakest point...
More accurately, they are only as secure as the Group Policies that force them to the same standard that is set on the server.
You dont have weak workstations on an AD network, just weak policies.
"To see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area".
vs
"And saw that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area."
Looks like author couldnt make up his mind whether he wanted present or past tense, and ended up with an awkward sentence.
If you read the article, and remember that meteorites are bits of rock that have fallen to earth, this is by no means conclusive-- the most accurate description appears to be the Slashdot Headline ("Building-Blocks-of-DNA-Confirmed-In-Meteorites"). They did test the surrounding area for similar molecules and did not find any, but the article does not state whether such material is found anywhere on earth, or how old the meteorites were, or where they were found.
So Im not clear on how the possibility that it is simply contamination is being ruled out, simply because they "checked against the surrounding area" (which again raises questions-- how big an area, how did they check, etc).
Some of the article sentences are as bad.
The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.
Im not sure quite whats wrong with the middle of that sentence, but it seems wrong-- shouldnt it be "and saw"?
You have to pass the bar exam to practice law; certainly that counts as an "absolute minimum"?
There appears to be a lot more to his complaint, such as
Cooley registrar's office personnel and professors are known to prolong or refuse to give letters of good standing and recommendations to students seeking to leave-like blocking a professional swimmer wearing a life jacket from jumping off the Titanic
He also indicates an incredibly high attrition rate, and a very low bar passage rate. In other words, youre likely to flunk out, and if you dont, youre still unlikely to pass the bar. That does sound like a rather awful university. I think he cited 60% attrition rate and 40-50% bar passage rate (so 15-20% of people who enter the school will actually be able to practice).
So your argument is that Macs are unsafe because they allow you to run Flash? Sure, as long as you stop complaining when Steve Jobs says how buggy and unsafe Flash is. Big chance, ehh?
So long as people blame Windows for Adobe's vulnerabilities, I will continue to point out that thats neither Microsoft's fault nor an area where Macs are safer.
. They can't include a (different) PDF reader with the OS, because if they did, Adobe would sue them for anti-competitive behavior.
I believe they could, if it werent their own. Im sure they could include Foxit, but it will never happen.
Thats fine, and not terribly suprising. Win7 is two years old, to tell me that a OS that is less than a month old has newer and better features is what one would expect.
You misunderstand me if you think I am saying OSX sucks (though I certainly am not willing to pay the premium for it); Im saying that I dont think Windows is anywhere near as awful as people are trying to paint it, and that with enough incentive the Mac viruses will start rolling out. However clever the OSX coders were, they made some mistakes, and somewhere out there are blackhats every bit as clever focused on trying to find holes in the most popular systems.
That may be; time will tell. But I remain convinced that whether or not it is slightly harder to hack an OS becomes irrelevant when there is money involved; the most important thing is to have least-privilege in place so the resulting infection is easier to clean.
So yeah, the fact that Macs keep "winning" Pwn2Own proves that Windows is attacked more. Not that its safer.
A LARGE majority of the attacks on windows are from 3rd party, cross platform browser plugins. Explain to me why Mac would be safer than windows, this being the case.
If you were doing it would you go after the Crap $800 dell running windows or the juicy $1600 Macbook Pro.
That was the ENTIRE point of my post. It was sort of an analogy, if you will-- Imagine the windows marketshare as the juicy Macbook Pro. Which are you going to target, as a hacker? Which will you spend all of your time trying to get?
And the second point I was making is that when Mac share becomes big enough, it doesnt seem like it will be an issue to exploit macs.
You seem not to understand what you have to do in Pwn2Own. You have to gain full "arbitrary code execution" and "filesystem access" rights on the system being attacked with nothing more than a link. No user interaction except for clicking a link is allowed.
Read the quoted example again-- your numbers "2" and "3" are notably absent. You arent allowed to have the user run .dmg files or .sh files; that would sort of defeat the entire purpose of Pwn2Own.
That is, if they added one of these sorts of links to google's AdWords, they could begin infecting Macs immediately.
Compare that to MS servers sitting in a room somewhere minding their own business with absolutely no human interaction. They get hacked if you just wait long enough.
Er, thats utterly untrue. All of Microsoft.coms stuff runs on Windows; all their email on Exchange.
It is not possible to just "hack" a Windows server, unless you count bruteforcing a completely unsecured server running with a weak password and Remote Desktop enabled (which it is not, by default). Depending on your windows edition, the first step you are instructed to do is "secure your system", and until you click "OK", all incoming ports are blocked.
You really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about; can you please explain to me how youre going to hack Windows servers with no interaction whatsoever, and RDP disabled?
Windows has done this since time immemorial, and generally makes it a PITA to run any downloaded content.
That old saw about Microsoft being vulnerable because of its market share is hog wash. There were over 3 million viruses and Trojans released last year. Were it a simple matter of market share percentages than about 12% of those would be Linux [osnews.com] viruses and another 10-15% would be Mac viruses. But, they are not. Well over 99% of them are Windows viruses. Only 19% of Internet web servers are running Windows but they are the source of essentially all malware.
Logic fail. If there is an 80% chance that you will make $100 by wearing blue on mondays, and this is public knowledge, what percentage of people do you think will wear blue on mondays? 80%, or all of them?
Blaming Windows users for security holes that Microsoft keeps secret from them is worse than obscene.
And trying to pretend that most exploits arent through cross platform browser plugins is just ignorant.
Those inflated virus numbers probably also include the fact that viruses are recompiled and repacked daily-- and thus need a different virus definition to detect. How, you might ask, can they afford to do that? Because theres MONEY involved.
Last-- you can always tell when someone doesnt know diddly about viruses when they start referring to "the number of viruses". Its irrelevant, an infection is an infection, and Macs can get infected by arbitrary code as easily as windows can.
Because of... wait for it... market share.
Malware writers would quite happily release malware for OSX if they could make it work
History disagrees.
In the first [Pwn2Own] contest, Dino A. Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay worked together to take down the first MacBook Pro.[5] On the second day of the conference Macauley sent an email which redirected the user to a malicious site. The site was able to infect the machine with a client-side Javascript vulnerability which allowed arbitrary command execution.[6]
Each subsequent year isnt much better.
And why so smug anyways, Safari is already exploited on windows, as are Firefox, Quicktime, Java, Acrobat reader, and Flash-- all of which are usually installed and vulnerable on Macs (unless you think that PDFs somehow arent as dangerous on OSX).
Wasnt there a story some months back about a PDF that could launch arbitrary code on all 3 common platforms (OSX, Linux, Windows)? Yea, enjoy your smugness while it lasts.
If the user is willing to do anything the app or websites tells them to, well, you can't protect them.
Reading up on Pwn2Own results, and reading the security update notes on major browsers / flash / acrobat would prove really informative. Most of the viruses Ive seen are not from incompetent users.
So I'm puzzled about who might be behind all this "MS is only attacked because it's so popular" propaganda
Might have something to do with the fact that the first machine to fall at Pwn2Own since its inception in 2007 has been a Mac, every time.
(2011 Pwn2Own writeup)
Wikipedia link of the whole sorry history
In the first contest, Dino A. Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay worked together to take down the first MacBook Pro.[5] On the second day of the conference Macauley sent an email which redirected the user to a malicious site. The site was able to infect the machine with a client-side Javascript vulnerability which allowed arbitrary command execution
In the 2008 contest, a successful exploit of Safari caused Mac OS X to be the first OS to fall in a hacking competition....
Etc, ad naseum.
Financial incentive? Check. Mac hacked? Check.
Er, I wasnt saying corps are awesome, Im saying OP is retarded because corporations will always be the ones who enable you to go online. Opensource works because copying bits is free; but making hardware, laying fiber, laying coax, and running datacenters all cost money and will always be run by for-profit corporations.
Who owns the satellites in your suggestion? Who makes the wifi technology?
Railing against all corporations as "need to go away" is retarded, because everything that enables you to post online (screens, keyboard, nics, etc) are made by corporations, and this isnt going to change.
Thats great, and I never said anonymity was worthless or necessarily bad.
Grats to everyone on reading comprehension fail, my point was that its not "Essential Liberty".