They are both susceptible to a range of phishing and spoofing attacks.
You are obfuscating the fact that IE is still more vulnerable than Firefox.
What ultimately makes a Windows exploit so much more disruptive than all the others is the fact that Windows commands such a large portion of the market.
I've never said a Mac virus would be as "disruptive" as a Windows virus.
The Switchback virus seems quite real.
Moron, that's a spoof. It doesn't actually exist.
Unix access control is a joke and it's absurd that you should hold it up as a paragon of security.
Idiot, I never said it was a "paragon of security".
As far as I am aware these have all been addressed.
Unfortunately, you keep mistaking your ignorance for fact.
You keep throwing up red herrings. The fact is that Windows is more exploitable than any modern Unix. Mac OS X is a modern Unix.
Yes, market share plays into it, but it's not the whole picture. You keep saying, "but Unix can be exploited too!" Well, no shit, sherlock. No one ever said it couldn't. But the fact is that Windows has ways of being exploited that are far easier to take advantage of.
You just don't comprehend this. You are ignorant.
The hypothetical virus/worm writer will target Windows for its market share. But there is still a 'demand' for infecting Unix as well. It's just far more difficult to successfully compromise a Unix computer. People obviously try--that's why rootkits exist for Unix as well. The problem is, they all require more effort to succeed than just sending an email, or hosting an ActiveX control.
Err, I'm not sure about that, actually. 99% of distros install their packages to/usr (right or wrong).
Right (not completely correct, as there are places outside of/usr/ that packages place things, but right in the way you meant it).
Now, autopackages may not be "official" distro packages, but they're packages all the same,
Right.
and thus it makes sense to do as the Romans do.
Wrong, only the Romans get to do everything the Romans do in Rome. The idea in Debian, for example, is that all the software installed via apt is kept in order by apt. When apt no longer controls the contents of/usr/, you introduce potential problems.
It seems wrong to me that they chose/usr/ over/usr/local/ or/opt/ or whatever the LSM states.
In my experience,/usr/local has primarily been the domain of stuff installed from source (eg, my stow repository resides there)...
That's clearly because you've only used the default system package manager.
In traditional Unix (as much as there is such a thing), it's been/usr/ for the default system software,/usr/local/ for software specific to a single machine, or set of machines, and/opt/ for "third party" software.
There really isn't that much to distinguish modern operating systems.
That's laughably absurd. Please understand I don't say this with malice, but you are ignorant. Please open yourself to learning before speaking on subjects you are ignorant of.
They all have integrated networking, more or less elaborate means of access control, a pretty GUI and some utility apps
Oh, you mean they are all OS's? I guess Firefox and IE are equally exploitable as well, since they both "are integrated multimedia/hyperlink graphical viewiers with a pretty UI and integrated plug-in architectures"?
Microsoft has made some baffling mistakes wrt to the implementation of some of it's userland software, but has ultimately fixed all of them as far as I'm aware.
That's absurd. What do you think the odds are that you have seen the last Windows virus/worm, that MS has finally fixed the last of their mistakes?
On the other hand Apple doesn't seem to take privilege escalation very seriously.
This isn't even in the same ballpark as Windows' security flaws. You can't exploit that remotely, and you can't base a worm on it. The best you can go for is a trojan, which is bad, but not the issue.
A number of them have been mentioned by another poster in this thread.
Will you quit showing your blatant sub-retard ignorance? They were all jokes, trojans, an actual legitimate program called "SoundDiver Virus" (and not a "sound driver virus" like the poster claimed), or required you to enter your admin password. Some idiot just googled for "mac os x virus" and pasted.
No, I contend that Windows is subjected to the most attacks because it has the largest market share.
Yeah, NO SHIT. Everyone can agree on this. But the point is that there is not one single virus or worm for OS X. NOT ONE! No one is saying OS X should have an equal number of viruses and worms as Windows. But why not one? You don't understand how operating systems work. You understand a few concepts, but you don't actually understand the security models involved. If you did, you'd realize that market share doesn't account for the disparity.
The largest and most important parts of OS X don't derive from BSD. At it's lowest level, OS X runs a Mach kernel, which was originally developed at CMU. Quartz, Cocoa and Carbon are NEXT/Apple developments. The "BSD heritage" of OS X is mostly a syscall table and some commandline tools that nobody uses.
Your last sentence is patently absurd and completely false. The rest is just facts that you clearly do not understand.
Even so, who said BSD was all there was to OS X? NO ONE. What was stated was that because OS X has a BSD foundation (and is, in fact, based directly on BSD, and OS X is Unix), it has certain design features which are, in practice, far more secure than those of Windows. That doesn't mean someone couldn't make a security hole ridden BSD, but it would certainly be less likely.
I'm telling you again, as a professional sysadmin and programmer, and a computer hobbyist (many architectures and OS's, including Amiga, OS/2, and Linux since prior to kernel 1.0 was released) that you do not understand the issue.
Services on by default, a lame firewall, ActiveX, Outlook, UI policies on file extensions, VB script, and a poor security policy, are all things that MS should have (and could have at any time in the past ~10 years) fixed by now. Had these things been taken care of, the Windows world of "viruses, worms, trojans and spyware" would be so incredibly small compared to now that it's hard to imagine.
Those things are all vectors, easily exploited vectors, for infecting Windows. Mac OS X has its potential vectors as well, but they are all more difficult to exploit. That's really all there is to it. The BSD heritage helps here similar to how decisions made in Win95 are still haunting MS now. You don't go a
The practice is that the OS with the largest market share is targetted by the largest number of trojans.
The issue isn't trojans, it's viruses and worms. Due to the design of OS X, it's inherently more difficult to infect with and spread a worm or a virus.
The market-share argument doesn't hold up. Classic Mac OS had a handful of viruses. So why none for OS X? Mac OS X has around a 3% market-share, so out of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of viruses out there, there is not a single one for Mac OS X?
Or to put it in simple terms for you: Windows has been shipped in a state where it can be remotely compromised before installation is even complete. This flaw in Windows is to support a feature that is completely unnecessary for the home user.
Only a person ignorant of the issues could claim that OS X is just as insecure as Windows. The facts just don't bear it. The vectors for viruses and worms just aren't there for Mac OS X like they are for Windows. You don't have an inherently flawed browser, you don't have services turned on by default, you don't have a mail program which can be tricked into running programs just by receiving an email, and so on.
The BSD underpinnings means you get a firewall, for free (I don't mean cost, I mean, you don't have to add one on). The BSD underpinnings means that you have a mature security policy which makes it extremely difficult to write a successful virus or worm that doesn't ask for the admin password.
But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So where are the Mac viruses and worms? Think about it for a second: your premise is that all OS's are equally exploitable? If not, then it would be quite amazing that both Windows and Mac OS X would be equally exploitable--I mean, certainly one would be somewhat more secure than the other, right? Wouldn't you expect it to be the one with the fewer (infinitely fewer, in this case, actually) proportion of viruses and worms?
Arguing that OS X's vaguely BSD-ish origins endow it with resistance (of unspecified nature) against such attacks is superstition.
OS X is not "vaguely" based on "BSD-ish" origins. I have specified the nature. If I was as vague as you are claiming, you'd be right about it being superstition. Instead, it's fact.
You are abysmally ignorant of the inner workings and design of Unix and specifically Mac OS X.
This is important because e.g. the Windows NT-based kernels provide a number of theoretically security enhancing features not present in any of the BSD kernels
And that's just it, isn't it? You are talking theory, and I'm talking practice.
It goes like this:
Claim: In theory NT is secure! Answer: In practice, it clearly isn't. (this answer is so obvious that it's almost absurd that I have to state it)
Claim: Which versions are you talking about? Answer: The versions in use. (this answer is so obvious that it's almost absurd that I have to state it)
Claim: It's unknown how the BSD core relates to OS X security. Answer: It's very clearly known. The BSD core implies a certain security policy, which OS X does follow. This does not guarantee security (and I never said it did), but it does help.
Show me that KDE (current version) is vastly different than KDE (current version -1).
Why? I never made such a claim. I just claimed the absurdity of your claim that KDE/GNOME/OS X are to Unix 30 years ago, as Longhorn is to XP.
One could arguably say that OSX 10.(2, 3, 4)'s "improvements" in the UI are just correctly mistakes against the MAC HIG that were made with 10.0 and 10.1 (brushed aluminum background rules, anyone?).
No one who knows anything about the subject could make such a mistaken claim.
So, please enlighten me. What makes KDE, Gnome, and OSX upgrades so revolutionary *at every single release*?
No need to, since that wasn't my position (nor is it GNOME's, KDE's or Apple's). The way MS is touting Longhorn, though, you'd think it was as big a jump as OS 9 -> OS X.
Just like Linux with Gnome, KDE (etc...) and OSX are just polished versions of an OS that was designed 30+ years ago.
There's a difference between moving menus around, and creating a whole new desktop environment. The parent poster's opinion is that the screenshots look mostly like a new theme for Windows XP.
GNOME, KDE, and OS X aren't just Unix with it's menus moved around and new icons for the widgets.
I'm not saying that's the case with Longhorn, but as MS pares away the features, it's really starting to appear less like the huge advance it was originally touted as. But I guess if the buttons are shinier, that's something...
It is unclear what bearing the BSD heritage has on the ability of OS X to thwart the kind of trojan/malware attacks that Windows users are subjected to.
Don't mistake the fact that something is unclear to you with the notion that something is not known.
Without knowing which versions of Apache, BSD, IIS and Windows you are referring to, it is impossible to establish whether your assertion that the Apache/BSD combo is more secure than the IIS/Windows combo is actually true.
Irrelevant to the question, "is BSD+Apache more secure than Windows+IIS?" The answer to that is quite clear, and has been consistent throughout the history of both pairs of products.
And even if it were universally true, it is unclear what bearing any purported security benefit of Apache/BSD over IIS/Windows has on the ability of OS X to thwart the mostly email-propagated attacks that Windows users are subjected to.
Again, there's a difference between your ignorance of something vs something being unknown. Because OS X is based on BSD, it's built upon a more firm foundation than Windows is. That doesn't guarantee OS X is more secure, but it certainly makes creating a secure OS X much more likely. Take then into account the fact that Windows faces a major in-the-wild exploit multiple times a year, while BSD/Linux/Mac OS X/etc face zero, and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see the connection.
Being based on BSD has nothing to do with anything,
Are you serious? It's a significant swath of the OS that you don't have to worry about!
the userland/desktop space is where most exploits have been in recent years
Wrong. Most 'theoretical' exploits have been in the BSD/OSS side of OS X. Absolutely none of those 'theoretical' exploits have been known to have been actually 'exploited' (all you've had was a 'click this to test' proof-of-concept).
the Aqua shell is no more free from exploits than Explorer is.
That's absurd. Aqua isn't what you use every day to visit untrusted sites with, while Explorer is. That makes it harder to exploit, which makes it inherently more secure.
I think (hope) they fixed that but it was still several months until all the holes and variants of this technique were "fixed" (really just hacked around).
The 'hack' fixes came out the same day, Apple's fix was about two weeks later, primarily because it wasn't a 'patch', it was a change in the policy for running apps from Safari.
Essentially, Apple haven't proven themselves any more skilled at designing secure desktops than Microsoft have.
Except for the fact that there have been *zero* malicious exploits for OS X.
Zero, none, el zip-o, a big goose egg (like the one on your face).
Although their reasoning may be questioned - it is their network, and you are probably going to just have to put up with it.
I'd like to point out your post adds *nothing* to the discussion.
The poster already knows he may be able to do nothing about it. What he's asking about is what he can do.
I really can't stand the idea that those with power are to be unaccountable, and those without are just supposed to 'suck it up'. (you may not hold that view exactly, but your 'advice' supports such a system)
On the extreme, your advice would suggest a coal miner can't demand safety measures of the mine owners, or that people couldn't unionize, that car companies can't be forced to add seat belts, etc--yes, these examples are safety issues, but the same logic applies (it's their mine/business/car factory, right?).
So maybe he can't force anything, but the University is wrong in their assessment. Hell, even if he *was* using BitTorrent illegally, the University wouldn't be liable!
How about a partially elastic collision with the surface (it bounces)?
What 'bounces'? With lower viscosity, it'll just spread.
How about collision with the leading edge of the spreading droplet (there is drag on the spreading drop as it extends across the surface--fast liquid building up behind could still splash over that barrier, even in the complete absence of atmosphere)
Again, lower viscosity will mitigate this.
Always be afraid of "intuitive" reasoning in physics when you're dealing with very slow or very fast processes that operate on very small or very large scales.:)
True, but we're not talking about the extremes of relativity here, or even the mild strangeness of the microscopic world.
The parent poster's point is that the initial thought (that lower viscosity fluids would have bigger splashes) vanishes after further thought about the dynamics. This does imply some of the caution you are suggesting, without the "don't think you're so smart" reprimand your post implies (whether you meant it or not, that is how it comes across, smiley notwithstanding).
You should check out the Dashboard demos. The one one Apple's Tiger site don't show the animations and effects the Macworld keynotes show.
When you bring in a widget, there's a ripple effect, and when you configure a widget, it flips over to present the back with the configuration options.
I think this sort of thing is best left with non-main windows, because it can be annoying if every time you move your browser window a little bit, it starts jiggling around.
Assuming you're not just a curmudgeon who prefers the Amish lifestyle, the thing about themes and eye candy is that they're often implemented by people who don't really grasp the concept of 'usability'.
Animation effects that tie things together (like the genie effect, the sheets effect, and bouncing dock icons, in Mac OS X) improve usability. Translucency that enables you to see useful information (translucent terminal windows) and drop shadows (that provide depth cues) also improve usability.
On the other hand, if every time you click a menu, a little prairie dog pops out of a little hole to pull down a menu like an old-fashioned window shade, then pops back underground, or if your terminal is translucent, but only shows the desktop (and not the actual windows behind it), you just get eye candy without usability.
Expect the "eye candy" from GNOME to provide mostly an increase in usability--yeah, sometimes they get it wrong, but they at least make it a solid priority.
You mean, you want to pre-empt a "my OS is better than yours." post with a "my OS is better than yours (well, will be 'in the end')," post?
The rich base of command line utilities and a solid kernel are necessary to have great degrees of stability and richness at the higher levels (like an X server). I find my Linux base indispensable (from the point of view of the usefulness and scriptability of all the UNIX tools and primitives),
How is this different than OS X, except that OS X's GUI is more advanced, has more commercial apps, games, and Cocoa (NeXT)?
Because in the end, I'll have a Free, Powerful Desktop that Looks Just As Good As Yours, while you may be stuck with a good-looking, but still proprietary, mess of a system that is still sorely weak in the basics.
What are you talking about? OS X is UNIX. What do you mean by "mess of a system"? In what way is OS X a "mess" but Linux not?
The problem with your statement (aside from the fact that it's wrong about quality) is that "the end" (as in "in the end") is a long ways off yet. Free is certainly desirable, no question, but why make it a religious absolute? Free is a feature, and a goal.
What I mean by that is that if being "Free" trumps all other features for you, hurray for you. Just don't go bragging about how superior your "Free" system is, when you're still lacking features of the proprietary software.
Free is good, I want Free to win, I run Free and non-Free because I don't operate computers to be Free, I operate computers to get things done.
Oh, and "in the end" we'll be running the exact same system, but until then, my OS is better than yours <g>.
Just my two cents... but undoubtedly in the time it took me to write this post, it will no longer be pre-emptive.
Yours was the first "My OS is Better Than Yours" post I've read (reading with Slashdot's default threshold).
Besides, look at how much a decent quality patch cable costs at a store.
Cat5 is $0.10/ft and it operates at higher bitrate than any home audio system requires. Digital and digital, it either works or it doesn't. You can buy more expensive cat5, but why would you? Same with digital audio.
There is no excuse to hook up a $1500 TV with a 50 cent S-Video cord from Wal-mart.
Most of your post was about digital. Digital either works or it doesn't. The audio isn't going to 'sound better' if you buy more expensive digital cables.
As for analog, no one is suggesting using a 50 cent cable. Sure, cheap cables are going to be problematic, but a $75 Monster cable doesn't give you much over the $10-$20 'high end' at Wal-Mart.
Maybe that's your point all along, but it sure doesn't appear so.
Well seeing as how "ideas" can't be held hostage, and that you can't "steal" IP. I'd say your argument has no legs to stand on.
I never said anything about 'hostages' or 'stealing'. Ideas can be kept secret, and the GPL requires that if you release the expression of your ideas in binary computer form, you have to make available the source code.
Nvidia shows that the GPL isn't any better a defense against that as say the BSD.
How so?
*I've noticed the BSDs are doing quite well despite all these "attacks against it", up to and including the AT&T one.
Enough with the straw men! I never said Free/Open/Net BSD are dying. I said that the BSD license doesn't foster a system as free as the one the GPL fosters.
That is exactly why I favor the BSD license: It's the freer of the two (GPL vs. BSD).
It's like saying a society with laws against slavery is freer than one that has no such limits. In both cases, one "freedom" is taken away so that the entire system is more free.
There are two dynamics at play:
1. The system that the license creates. 2. The individual instances within that system.
The system the GPL creates is more free, but the BSD allows for one more freedom in the individual cases.
The BSD promoters (who use 'freedom' as a reason) seem to be missing the forest, and only seeing the trees. It's one thing if you want your code to be usable in proprietary products, but that's not promoting freedom in the system.
Just as the protecting freedom of speech means protecting speech you hate,
That's entirely different. The analog would be "protecting the right of someone to write software you don't like." It's not the code that people are upset about, it's the (closed) license.
protecting an open sharing society means sharing with people who don't want to share it forward.
The GPL does not force you to "share it forward". In fact, it explicitly allows you modify it all you want for personal use without requiring you to "share it forward". It's not until you distribute the code that you have to allow access to the code.
Think about what you wrote: "protecting an open sharing society means sharing with people who don't want to share."
Both the BSD license and the GPL share with people who don't want to share, but only the GPL "protects a sharing society" by not allowing people to take something from within the sharing society, and use it to directly attack the sharing society.
Let's clear up a few myths. First, there is no such thing as a digital signal.
Yes, there is. It's a logical system.
Inside your computer, the whole process is literally analog as well, but it models a digital system, and must do so perfectly.
The cables and wires that transfer hundreds, even thousands of gigabytes a day are far cheaper and far less impressive looking than the snake-oil you get from Monster.
Cat-5, Serial-ATA, USB, FireWire--these are all high speed, are all digital, and all error-free (within the design specs which account for error correction).
First off, pipe it down some. Your post looks like that of a raving mad loony before a person even reads one word.
Why oh why can't you idiots understand that there is a FREE MARKET at work here
Actually the 'free market' is a myth. It doesn't really exists. It's a mental construct that we use to describe something far more complex and nuanced (ie: reality).
Were it not, directors and authors would not sign on the bottom line.
Their choice in the matter is artificially limited. In other words, they don't operate within a 'free market'.
Why oh why can't you pro piracy liars finally just grasp the simple economic reality that it is neither a common nor easy nor cheap task to take my bathroom hummings and turn them into a product?
Actually, it's very inexpensive to turn 'bathroom hummings' into a product. The high costs in the non-free market are all artificial (hence, it's not a free market).
It's not rocket science. It's BASIC ECONOMICS.
Economics is far more complex than rocket science. The difference is that you can join in mass delusions, and get things, 'somewhat right' in economics and not know things are a mess, while in rocket science you can't play fast and loose with reality.
Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.
That's not what 'free' means. 'Free' is something that has a specific context--in the case at hand, the context is monetary payment, of which the service is provided for 'free' (as is Google, slashdot, etc).
You're talking about causality--specifically that for every effect (say, you get a free hotdog at the mall), there must be a cause. That doesn't make the hotdog any less free, as long as you understand the context.
Slashdot Mirror
They are both susceptible to a range of phishing and spoofing attacks.
You are obfuscating the fact that IE is still more vulnerable than Firefox.
What ultimately makes a Windows exploit so much more disruptive than all the others is the fact that Windows commands such a large portion of the market.
I've never said a Mac virus would be as "disruptive" as a Windows virus.
The Switchback virus seems quite real.
Moron, that's a spoof. It doesn't actually exist.
Unix access control is a joke and it's absurd that you should hold it up as a paragon of security.
Idiot, I never said it was a "paragon of security".
As far as I am aware these have all been addressed.
Unfortunately, you keep mistaking your ignorance for fact.
You keep throwing up red herrings. The fact is that Windows is more exploitable than any modern Unix. Mac OS X is a modern Unix.
Yes, market share plays into it, but it's not the whole picture. You keep saying, "but Unix can be exploited too!" Well, no shit, sherlock. No one ever said it couldn't. But the fact is that Windows has ways of being exploited that are far easier to take advantage of.
You just don't comprehend this. You are ignorant.
The hypothetical virus/worm writer will target Windows for its market share. But there is still a 'demand' for infecting Unix as well. It's just far more difficult to successfully compromise a Unix computer. People obviously try--that's why rootkits exist for Unix as well. The problem is, they all require more effort to succeed than just sending an email, or hosting an ActiveX control.
Err, I'm not sure about that, actually. 99% of distros install their packages to /usr (right or wrong).
/usr/ that packages place things, but right in the way you meant it).
/usr/, you introduce potential problems.
/usr/ over /usr/local/ or /opt/ or whatever the LSM states.
/usr/local has primarily been the domain of stuff installed from source (eg, my stow repository resides there)...
/usr/ for the default system software, /usr/local/ for software specific to a single machine, or set of machines, and /opt/ for "third party" software.
Right (not completely correct, as there are places outside of
Now, autopackages may not be "official" distro packages, but they're packages all the same,
Right.
and thus it makes sense to do as the Romans do.
Wrong, only the Romans get to do everything the Romans do in Rome. The idea in Debian, for example, is that all the software installed via apt is kept in order by apt. When apt no longer controls the contents of
It seems wrong to me that they chose
In my experience,
That's clearly because you've only used the default system package manager.
In traditional Unix (as much as there is such a thing), it's been
There really isn't that much to distinguish modern operating systems.
That's laughably absurd. Please understand I don't say this with malice, but you are ignorant. Please open yourself to learning before speaking on subjects you are ignorant of.
They all have integrated networking, more or less elaborate means of access control, a pretty GUI and some utility apps
Oh, you mean they are all OS's? I guess Firefox and IE are equally exploitable as well, since they both "are integrated multimedia/hyperlink graphical viewiers with a pretty UI and integrated plug-in architectures"?
Microsoft has made some baffling mistakes wrt to the implementation of some of it's userland software, but has ultimately fixed all of them as far as I'm aware.
That's absurd. What do you think the odds are that you have seen the last Windows virus/worm, that MS has finally fixed the last of their mistakes?
On the other hand Apple doesn't seem to take privilege escalation very seriously.
This isn't even in the same ballpark as Windows' security flaws. You can't exploit that remotely, and you can't base a worm on it. The best you can go for is a trojan, which is bad, but not the issue.
A number of them have been mentioned by another poster in this thread.
Will you quit showing your blatant sub-retard ignorance? They were all jokes, trojans, an actual legitimate program called "SoundDiver Virus" (and not a "sound driver virus" like the poster claimed), or required you to enter your admin password. Some idiot just googled for "mac os x virus" and pasted.
No, I contend that Windows is subjected to the most attacks because it has the largest market share.
Yeah, NO SHIT. Everyone can agree on this. But the point is that there is not one single virus or worm for OS X. NOT ONE! No one is saying OS X should have an equal number of viruses and worms as Windows. But why not one? You don't understand how operating systems work. You understand a few concepts, but you don't actually understand the security models involved. If you did, you'd realize that market share doesn't account for the disparity.
The largest and most important parts of OS X don't derive from BSD. At it's lowest level, OS X runs a Mach kernel, which was originally developed at CMU. Quartz, Cocoa and Carbon are NEXT/Apple developments. The "BSD heritage" of OS X is mostly a syscall table and some commandline tools that nobody uses.
Your last sentence is patently absurd and completely false. The rest is just facts that you clearly do not understand.
Even so, who said BSD was all there was to OS X? NO ONE. What was stated was that because OS X has a BSD foundation (and is, in fact, based directly on BSD, and OS X is Unix), it has certain design features which are, in practice, far more secure than those of Windows. That doesn't mean someone couldn't make a security hole ridden BSD, but it would certainly be less likely.
I'm telling you again, as a professional sysadmin and programmer, and a computer hobbyist (many architectures and OS's, including Amiga, OS/2, and Linux since prior to kernel 1.0 was released) that you do not understand the issue.
Services on by default, a lame firewall, ActiveX, Outlook, UI policies on file extensions, VB script, and a poor security policy, are all things that MS should have (and could have at any time in the past ~10 years) fixed by now. Had these things been taken care of, the Windows world of "viruses, worms, trojans and spyware" would be so incredibly small compared to now that it's hard to imagine.
Those things are all vectors, easily exploited vectors, for infecting Windows. Mac OS X has its potential vectors as well, but they are all more difficult to exploit. That's really all there is to it. The BSD heritage helps here similar to how decisions made in Win95 are still haunting MS now. You don't go a
The practice is that the OS with the largest market share is targetted by the largest number of trojans.
The issue isn't trojans, it's viruses and worms. Due to the design of OS X, it's inherently more difficult to infect with and spread a worm or a virus.
The market-share argument doesn't hold up. Classic Mac OS had a handful of viruses. So why none for OS X? Mac OS X has around a 3% market-share, so out of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of viruses out there, there is not a single one for Mac OS X?
Or to put it in simple terms for you: Windows has been shipped in a state where it can be remotely compromised before installation is even complete. This flaw in Windows is to support a feature that is completely unnecessary for the home user.
Only a person ignorant of the issues could claim that OS X is just as insecure as Windows. The facts just don't bear it. The vectors for viruses and worms just aren't there for Mac OS X like they are for Windows. You don't have an inherently flawed browser, you don't have services turned on by default, you don't have a mail program which can be tricked into running programs just by receiving an email, and so on.
The BSD underpinnings means you get a firewall, for free (I don't mean cost, I mean, you don't have to add one on). The BSD underpinnings means that you have a mature security policy which makes it extremely difficult to write a successful virus or worm that doesn't ask for the admin password.
But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So where are the Mac viruses and worms? Think about it for a second: your premise is that all OS's are equally exploitable? If not, then it would be quite amazing that both Windows and Mac OS X would be equally exploitable--I mean, certainly one would be somewhat more secure than the other, right? Wouldn't you expect it to be the one with the fewer (infinitely fewer, in this case, actually) proportion of viruses and worms?
Arguing that OS X's vaguely BSD-ish origins endow it with resistance (of unspecified nature) against such attacks is superstition.
OS X is not "vaguely" based on "BSD-ish" origins. I have specified the nature. If I was as vague as you are claiming, you'd be right about it being superstition. Instead, it's fact.
You are abysmally ignorant of the inner workings and design of Unix and specifically Mac OS X.
This is important because e.g. the Windows NT-based kernels provide a number of theoretically security enhancing features not present in any of the BSD kernels
And that's just it, isn't it? You are talking theory, and I'm talking practice.
It goes like this:
Claim: In theory NT is secure!
Answer: In practice, it clearly isn't. (this answer is so obvious that it's almost absurd that I have to state it)
Claim: Which versions are you talking about?
Answer: The versions in use. (this answer is so obvious that it's almost absurd that I have to state it)
Claim: It's unknown how the BSD core relates to OS X security.
Answer: It's very clearly known. The BSD core implies a certain security policy, which OS X does follow. This does not guarantee security (and I never said it did), but it does help.
Show me that KDE (current version) is vastly different than KDE (current version -1).
Why? I never made such a claim. I just claimed the absurdity of your claim that KDE/GNOME/OS X are to Unix 30 years ago, as Longhorn is to XP.
One could arguably say that OSX 10.(2, 3, 4)'s "improvements" in the UI are just correctly mistakes against the MAC HIG that were made with 10.0 and 10.1 (brushed aluminum background rules, anyone?).
No one who knows anything about the subject could make such a mistaken claim.
So, please enlighten me. What makes KDE, Gnome, and OSX upgrades so revolutionary *at every single release*?
No need to, since that wasn't my position (nor is it GNOME's, KDE's or Apple's). The way MS is touting Longhorn, though, you'd think it was as big a jump as OS 9 -> OS X.
Just like Linux with Gnome, KDE (etc...) and OSX are just polished versions of an OS that was designed 30+ years ago.
There's a difference between moving menus around, and creating a whole new desktop environment. The parent poster's opinion is that the screenshots look mostly like a new theme for Windows XP.
GNOME, KDE, and OS X aren't just Unix with it's menus moved around and new icons for the widgets.
I'm not saying that's the case with Longhorn, but as MS pares away the features, it's really starting to appear less like the huge advance it was originally touted as. But I guess if the buttons are shinier, that's something...
It is unclear what bearing the BSD heritage has on the ability of OS X to thwart the kind of trojan/malware attacks that Windows users are subjected to.
Don't mistake the fact that something is unclear to you with the notion that something is not known.
Without knowing which versions of Apache, BSD, IIS and Windows you are referring to, it is impossible to establish whether your assertion that the Apache/BSD combo is more secure than the IIS/Windows combo is actually true.
Irrelevant to the question, "is BSD+Apache more secure than Windows+IIS?" The answer to that is quite clear, and has been consistent throughout the history of both pairs of products.
And even if it were universally true, it is unclear what bearing any purported security benefit of Apache/BSD over IIS/Windows has on the ability of OS X to thwart the mostly email-propagated attacks that Windows users are subjected to.
Again, there's a difference between your ignorance of something vs something being unknown. Because OS X is based on BSD, it's built upon a more firm foundation than Windows is. That doesn't guarantee OS X is more secure, but it certainly makes creating a secure OS X much more likely. Take then into account the fact that Windows faces a major in-the-wild exploit multiple times a year, while BSD/Linux/Mac OS X/etc face zero, and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see the connection.
Being based on BSD has nothing to do with anything,
Are you serious? It's a significant swath of the OS that you don't have to worry about!
the userland/desktop space is where most exploits have been in recent years
Wrong. Most 'theoretical' exploits have been in the BSD/OSS side of OS X. Absolutely none of those 'theoretical' exploits have been known to have been actually 'exploited' (all you've had was a 'click this to test' proof-of-concept).
the Aqua shell is no more free from exploits than Explorer is.
That's absurd. Aqua isn't what you use every day to visit untrusted sites with, while Explorer is. That makes it harder to exploit, which makes it inherently more secure.
I think (hope) they fixed that but it was still several months until all the holes and variants of this technique were "fixed" (really just hacked around).
The 'hack' fixes came out the same day, Apple's fix was about two weeks later, primarily because it wasn't a 'patch', it was a change in the policy for running apps from Safari.
Essentially, Apple haven't proven themselves any more skilled at designing secure desktops than Microsoft have.
Except for the fact that there have been *zero* malicious exploits for OS X.
Zero, none, el zip-o, a big goose egg (like the one on your face).
Although their reasoning may be questioned - it is their network, and you are probably going to just have to put up with it.
I'd like to point out your post adds *nothing* to the discussion.
The poster already knows he may be able to do nothing about it. What he's asking about is what he can do.
I really can't stand the idea that those with power are to be unaccountable, and those without are just supposed to 'suck it up'. (you may not hold that view exactly, but your 'advice' supports such a system)
On the extreme, your advice would suggest a coal miner can't demand safety measures of the mine owners, or that people couldn't unionize, that car companies can't be forced to add seat belts, etc--yes, these examples are safety issues, but the same logic applies (it's their mine/business/car factory, right?).
So maybe he can't force anything, but the University is wrong in their assessment. Hell, even if he *was* using BitTorrent illegally, the University wouldn't be liable!
"Intuition" is not science. Until you create and test the models, you don't have science, all you have is opinion, speculation, and navel-gazing.
Case in point:
Wind resistance overcomes the surface tension of the water and scatters it.
The story is about viscosity, not surface tension.
How about a partially elastic collision with the surface (it bounces)?
:)
What 'bounces'? With lower viscosity, it'll just spread.
How about collision with the leading edge of the spreading droplet (there is drag on the spreading drop as it extends across the surface--fast liquid building up behind could still splash over that barrier, even in the complete absence of atmosphere)
Again, lower viscosity will mitigate this.
Always be afraid of "intuitive" reasoning in physics when you're dealing with very slow or very fast processes that operate on very small or very large scales.
True, but we're not talking about the extremes of relativity here, or even the mild strangeness of the microscopic world.
The parent poster's point is that the initial thought (that lower viscosity fluids would have bigger splashes) vanishes after further thought about the dynamics. This does imply some of the caution you are suggesting, without the "don't think you're so smart" reprimand your post implies (whether you meant it or not, that is how it comes across, smiley notwithstanding).
Believe me, we most certainly don't point to Acrobat Reader when pointing out "desktop superiority".
In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the other way around!
You should check out the Dashboard demos. The one one Apple's Tiger site don't show the animations and effects the Macworld keynotes show.
When you bring in a widget, there's a ripple effect, and when you configure a widget, it flips over to present the back with the configuration options.
I think this sort of thing is best left with non-main windows, because it can be annoying if every time you move your browser window a little bit, it starts jiggling around.
Assuming you're not just a curmudgeon who prefers the Amish lifestyle, the thing about themes and eye candy is that they're often implemented by people who don't really grasp the concept of 'usability'.
Animation effects that tie things together (like the genie effect, the sheets effect, and bouncing dock icons, in Mac OS X) improve usability. Translucency that enables you to see useful information (translucent terminal windows) and drop shadows (that provide depth cues) also improve usability.
On the other hand, if every time you click a menu, a little prairie dog pops out of a little hole to pull down a menu like an old-fashioned window shade, then pops back underground, or if your terminal is translucent, but only shows the desktop (and not the actual windows behind it), you just get eye candy without usability.
Expect the "eye candy" from GNOME to provide mostly an increase in usability--yeah, sometimes they get it wrong, but they at least make it a solid priority.
What a waste. A window manager? There are a ton of valuable things they could be spending time on.
This isn't the improvment we're looking for, move along, move along...
What enhancements are you working on again?
In other words, why should they do what you want? This is Open Source, they should be doing what they want.
You mean, you want to pre-empt a "my OS is better than yours." post with a "my OS is better than yours (well, will be 'in the end')," post?
The rich base of command line utilities and a solid kernel are necessary to have great degrees of stability and richness at the higher levels (like an X server). I find my Linux base indispensable (from the point of view of the usefulness and scriptability of all the UNIX tools and primitives),
How is this different than OS X, except that OS X's GUI is more advanced, has more commercial apps, games, and Cocoa (NeXT)?
Because in the end, I'll have a Free, Powerful Desktop that Looks Just As Good As Yours, while you may be stuck with a good-looking, but still proprietary, mess of a system that is still sorely weak in the basics.
What are you talking about? OS X is UNIX. What do you mean by "mess of a system"? In what way is OS X a "mess" but Linux not?
The problem with your statement (aside from the fact that it's wrong about quality) is that "the end" (as in "in the end") is a long ways off yet. Free is certainly desirable, no question, but why make it a religious absolute? Free is a feature, and a goal.
What I mean by that is that if being "Free" trumps all other features for you, hurray for you. Just don't go bragging about how superior your "Free" system is, when you're still lacking features of the proprietary software.
Free is good, I want Free to win, I run Free and non-Free because I don't operate computers to be Free, I operate computers to get things done.
Oh, and "in the end" we'll be running the exact same system, but until then, my OS is better than yours <g>.
Just my two cents... but undoubtedly in the time it took me to write this post, it will no longer be pre-emptive.
Yours was the first "My OS is Better Than Yours" post I've read (reading with Slashdot's default threshold).
Besides, look at how much a decent quality patch cable costs at a store.
Cat5 is $0.10/ft and it operates at higher bitrate than any home audio system requires. Digital and digital, it either works or it doesn't. You can buy more expensive cat5, but why would you? Same with digital audio.
There is no excuse to hook up a $1500 TV with a 50 cent S-Video cord from Wal-mart.
Most of your post was about digital. Digital either works or it doesn't. The audio isn't going to 'sound better' if you buy more expensive digital cables.
As for analog, no one is suggesting using a 50 cent cable. Sure, cheap cables are going to be problematic, but a $75 Monster cable doesn't give you much over the $10-$20 'high end' at Wal-Mart.
Maybe that's your point all along, but it sure doesn't appear so.
Well seeing as how "ideas" can't be held hostage, and that you can't "steal" IP. I'd say your argument has no legs to stand on.
I never said anything about 'hostages' or 'stealing'. Ideas can be kept secret, and the GPL requires that if you release the expression of your ideas in binary computer form, you have to make available the source code.
Nvidia shows that the GPL isn't any better a defense against that as say the BSD.
How so?
*I've noticed the BSDs are doing quite well despite all these "attacks against it", up to and including the AT&T one.
Enough with the straw men! I never said Free/Open/Net BSD are dying. I said that the BSD license doesn't foster a system as free as the one the GPL fosters.
That is exactly why I favor the BSD license: It's the freer of the two (GPL vs. BSD).
It's like saying a society with laws against slavery is freer than one that has no such limits. In both cases, one "freedom" is taken away so that the entire system is more free.
There are two dynamics at play:
1. The system that the license creates.
2. The individual instances within that system.
The system the GPL creates is more free, but the BSD allows for one more freedom in the individual cases.
The BSD promoters (who use 'freedom' as a reason) seem to be missing the forest, and only seeing the trees. It's one thing if you want your code to be usable in proprietary products, but that's not promoting freedom in the system.
Just as the protecting freedom of speech means protecting speech you hate,
That's entirely different. The analog would be "protecting the right of someone to write software you don't like." It's not the code that people are upset about, it's the (closed) license.
protecting an open sharing society means sharing with people who don't want to share it forward.
The GPL does not force you to "share it forward". In fact, it explicitly allows you modify it all you want for personal use without requiring you to "share it forward". It's not until you distribute the code that you have to allow access to the code.
Think about what you wrote: "protecting an open sharing society means sharing with people who don't want to share."
Both the BSD license and the GPL share with people who don't want to share, but only the GPL "protects a sharing society" by not allowing people to take something from within the sharing society, and use it to directly attack the sharing society.
Let's clear up a few myths. First, there is no such thing as a digital signal.
Yes, there is. It's a logical system.
Inside your computer, the whole process is literally analog as well, but it models a digital system, and must do so perfectly.
The cables and wires that transfer hundreds, even thousands of gigabytes a day are far cheaper and far less impressive looking than the snake-oil you get from Monster.
Cat-5, Serial-ATA, USB, FireWire--these are all high speed, are all digital, and all error-free (within the design specs which account for error correction).
First off, pipe it down some. Your post looks like that of a raving mad loony before a person even reads one word.
Why oh why can't you idiots understand that there is a FREE MARKET at work here
Actually the 'free market' is a myth. It doesn't really exists. It's a mental construct that we use to describe something far more complex and nuanced (ie: reality).
Were it not, directors and authors would not sign on the bottom line.
Their choice in the matter is artificially limited. In other words, they don't operate within a 'free market'.
Why oh why can't you pro piracy liars finally just grasp the simple economic reality that it is neither a common nor easy nor cheap task to take my bathroom hummings and turn them into a product?
Actually, it's very inexpensive to turn 'bathroom hummings' into a product. The high costs in the non-free market are all artificial (hence, it's not a free market).
It's not rocket science. It's BASIC ECONOMICS.
Economics is far more complex than rocket science. The difference is that you can join in mass delusions, and get things, 'somewhat right' in economics and not know things are a mess, while in rocket science you can't play fast and loose with reality.
..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".
Sure there is.
Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.
That's not what 'free' means. 'Free' is something that has a specific context--in the case at hand, the context is monetary payment, of which the service is provided for 'free' (as is Google, slashdot, etc).
You're talking about causality--specifically that for every effect (say, you get a free hotdog at the mall), there must be a cause. That doesn't make the hotdog any less free, as long as you understand the context.
Is it still OK to violate RIAA and MPAA copyrights?
Yes.
Duh.