Uhm... you don't need a law degree to know that the federal government can certainly create an organization to oversee cybersecurity for the federal government. I guess you were modded "Insightful" because "paranoid" isn't a mod option.
Apple packages their OS updates based on the delta from the starting position of the users applying it, and wether the platform of the update is known at download time. Updates which include both PowerPC and Intel, and which span more than the most recent OS update tend to be quite large. However, for users this can be quite convenient. Your claim that one can learn something from the security of the platform from the size of an update is bogus, particularly as you don't cite any relevant evidence or provide a chain of argument supporting your claim.
Is BadAnalogyGuy a well known troll, then? Why so many funny, insightful and other positive mod points raining down on him, then? Oh, this is Slashdot.
Clearly your post demonstrates that you don't understand the subject well, but it doesn't *seem* like you're Trolling. Perhaps in context... hrm... over half of your recent posts were up-modded, so you don't appear to be a well known Troll. MODS! Get a grip. Security issues are complex. Obviously you mods don't know the subject any better. Meta moderation will punish you.
Mac OS X has had potential buffer overflow exploits, corrected in security updates and OS updates, Since the Earth Cooled (TM). Apple might be taking them a little more seriously, or they might be receiving more attention from others, now that the assembly language required to exploit them is understood by all the crax0rs, instead of merely 20% of them. Apple isn't suddenly experiencing the same type of security problems. Some defects exist (you typically learn of them when a patch becomes available) but have not yet been exploited by worms and viruses. The relative seriousness and amount of defects between the platforms is a matter of some debate.
Moreover, some of the mechanisms used to propagate malware on Windows rely on tricking the user (social engineering) into installing the malware. Those techniques, independent of exploitable defects, are certainly possible to apply to the Mac. Apparently a few attempts have been made (such as trojans planted in cracked pirate warezs recently). Widespread damage hasn't yet resulted, but isn't out of the question.
To p0wn a million Macs, one need only trick about 3% of Mac users into installing your malware. I've seen a couple clever Windows email viruses which tricked from 1/3 to 1/2 of the users who got the email within the first hour, infecting over 1% of an enterprise network, before the alerts went out and antivirus definitions were updated. I think the success of some of these tricks on Windows indicates pretty clearly that a malware outbreak on the Mac on the scale of a million victims or more is certainly possible, even without finding a defect and engineering the exploit. An email based scam, seeded with a list of known Mac users might do the trick. The Bad Guys (TM) could easily generate such a list by reading the emails on the millions of infected Windows computers, and snarfing the addresses out of received emails which came from known Mac email clients.
Of course, even those malware which relied primarily on social engineering, also rely on their ability to masquerade as a spreadsheet when they are really an exe, in the most popular Windows email clients, so it might be quite a bit harder to exploit social engineering on the Mac. It's hard to say, and I haven't seen any evidence that it's been tried yet.
If it does happen, the Mac community is not really prepared for it. AntiVirus software doesn't appear to be in use by most Mac users. There isn't a legion of companies rushing cleanup tools out the door every day. Mac users are not in the habit of looking for such regardless.
A gargantuan software company (now defunct) had such a voicemail system in the early 1990s, allowing people to send voicemails as you would an email, and even address multiple people and groups. When used sparingly it was great. Unfortunately, the company developed a voicemail subculture among folk who couldn't or wouldn't type, and the tool was ruined. Imagine getting dozens of voicemails every day, from sales people, managers, and the CEO. Which ones can you ignore without getting fired? It's difficult to assess without listening to all of them. That burned over an hour a day, for each employee.
Many, many development shops which don't have the enormous global soapbox of Trent Reznor and NIN are still getting shafted explicitly and anally by Apple's backward app approval policies. They don't respond to our emails. They don't tell us why. iFlinger.
Uh... the guy posted this shit to his blog. He works for the company he's bad mouthing. That's pretty stupid. It doesn't take much "evidence" beyond what the guy already provided. If Sun had many more employees of that caliber, it's little wonder they declined.
Flamebait? Flamebait? Moderator, Dudes. I'm serious abou this. Flamebait is stuff like... posting dirty laundry about your employer to your blog. The guy should be thoroughly debriefed about his full 10 points, and then fired.
Apple participated in the design of the PowerPC. That worked out pretty well. I've had two people tell me within the past week that they went back and used a PowerPC Mac Mini (both upgraded to 1GB of RAM) and how zippy it was under Leopard. They were surprised, since the systems were something like 5 years old, and max out at 1GB of RAM.
Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).
Apple is also a participant in LLVM, which is going to help Apple shorten the design-to-deployment cycle for new silicon.
"Apple doesn't do cheap, so a iPhone Lite is out of the question."
You fail to consider that "cheap" and "inexpensive" need not be equivalent. Look at the history of the iPod. As technology advanced, Apple was able to fill in product offerings at lower price points with high quality offerings at low price points.
RoughlyDrafted.com fails to sufficiently address a few important factors. Apple can only address about 30% of the U.S. cell phone market with AT&T . Sure, a couple million customers migrate to AT&T every now and then, but there exists a certain amount of inertia in the market, plus, Verizon simply provides coverage in vast areas of the U.S. that AT&T totally ignores. Apple wants to sell iPhone to anyone who wants it.
It's inevitable that iPhone will, eventually, be available through more than one phone company in the U.S. Perhaps AT&T can make it interesting to Apple to continue their exclusive arrangement for a while, maybe even the full rumored five years from iPhone launch, but it's virtually impossible to justify continuing an exclusive arrangement after that. AT&T, for example, is not going to reciprocate by refraining from offer of BlackBerry products on AT&T now, are they? Nope. Apple would be ceding 70% of the market, indefinitely, if they didn't consider offering through other companies. This exclusive arrangement is really only useful to Apple during the early lifecycle of iPhone, say, the first two to three years for sure, fuzzy to five years. After that it becomes a liability, for Apple, no matter how appealing it is for AT&T.
You're fooling yourself. This could have been going on for years, and somebody just noticed because they installed an IDS upgrade, or turn on a new rule or something. The impression that the entire US government has their computer security ducks in a row is comforting, perhaps, but not really true.
IBM and Oracle play together
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
"Somehow i did hoped IBM would go and buy SUN, if this is really definitive.. how do IBM and Oracle play together ?"
IBM makes products that compete, no matter what segment of the IT industry a company is in. IBM also plays nicely with many of those companies, as IBM makes enormous amounts of revenue by introducing complexity into a customer environment, and providing consultants to glue it all together.
"Oracle doesn't have the commitment to open standards and open source that Sun does."
Agreed. But it should be quite clear to anyone watching that Sun hasn't been able to figure out how to make money with this strategic commitment to open source. The new company might be able to find a workable middle ground. It doesn't seem likely, though, I agree.
"Sun = Poorly run company with great products Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products"
Yes, this is exactly the reason why this could turn out to be an interesting merger. Most of the mergers of UNIX workstation vendors were not interesting, and essentially served to consolidate customer bases. An acquisition of Sun by IBM would have been like that. IBM had overlapping products, and this would have resulted in the end of life for both SPARC and Solaris.
Oracle and Sun, however, have complementary product lines. The potential certainly exists for a vibrant new company to emerge from this. It probably won't but at least this way there is a chance.
No, IBM isn't kicking themselves. They are gleeful. They believe that Oracle+Sun will be an enormous destruction of shareholder value -- for somebody else's share holders.
Re:Sun/Apple merger more likely?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
Hrm... that posted Anonymous Coward. Wasn't intentional. Those were my thoughts, simple or flawed as they may be, I'm not ashamed of them.
sparc and oracle
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Sun's multicore sparc work is basically custom designed to run giant database servers, and giant web servers with giant database back ends. Doing so at lower power draw than the competition has the potential to be a market winner. That alone will not be sufficient, however.
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Uhm... you don't need a law degree to know that the federal government can certainly create an organization to oversee cybersecurity for the federal government. I guess you were modded "Insightful" because "paranoid" isn't a mod option.
The first load after a login isn't faster, but subsequent loads of Dashboard are really quite zippy.
Apple packages their OS updates based on the delta from the starting position of the users applying it, and wether the platform of the update is known at download time. Updates which include both PowerPC and Intel, and which span more than the most recent OS update tend to be quite large. However, for users this can be quite convenient. Your claim that one can learn something from the security of the platform from the size of an update is bogus, particularly as you don't cite any relevant evidence or provide a chain of argument supporting your claim.
Is BadAnalogyGuy a well known troll, then? Why so many funny, insightful and other positive mod points raining down on him, then? Oh, this is Slashdot.
Clearly your post demonstrates that you don't understand the subject well, but it doesn't *seem* like you're Trolling. Perhaps in context... hrm... over half of your recent posts were up-modded, so you don't appear to be a well known Troll. MODS! Get a grip. Security issues are complex. Obviously you mods don't know the subject any better. Meta moderation will punish you.
Mac OS X has had potential buffer overflow exploits, corrected in security updates and OS updates, Since the Earth Cooled (TM). Apple might be taking them a little more seriously, or they might be receiving more attention from others, now that the assembly language required to exploit them is understood by all the crax0rs, instead of merely 20% of them. Apple isn't suddenly experiencing the same type of security problems. Some defects exist (you typically learn of them when a patch becomes available) but have not yet been exploited by worms and viruses. The relative seriousness and amount of defects between the platforms is a matter of some debate.
Moreover, some of the mechanisms used to propagate malware on Windows rely on tricking the user (social engineering) into installing the malware. Those techniques, independent of exploitable defects, are certainly possible to apply to the Mac. Apparently a few attempts have been made (such as trojans planted in cracked pirate warezs recently). Widespread damage hasn't yet resulted, but isn't out of the question.
To p0wn a million Macs, one need only trick about 3% of Mac users into installing your malware. I've seen a couple clever Windows email viruses which tricked from 1/3 to 1/2 of the users who got the email within the first hour, infecting over 1% of an enterprise network, before the alerts went out and antivirus definitions were updated. I think the success of some of these tricks on Windows indicates pretty clearly that a malware outbreak on the Mac on the scale of a million victims or more is certainly possible, even without finding a defect and engineering the exploit. An email based scam, seeded with a list of known Mac users might do the trick. The Bad Guys (TM) could easily generate such a list by reading the emails on the millions of infected Windows computers, and snarfing the addresses out of received emails which came from known Mac email clients.
Of course, even those malware which relied primarily on social engineering, also rely on their ability to masquerade as a spreadsheet when they are really an exe, in the most popular Windows email clients, so it might be quite a bit harder to exploit social engineering on the Mac. It's hard to say, and I haven't seen any evidence that it's been tried yet.
If it does happen, the Mac community is not really prepared for it. AntiVirus software doesn't appear to be in use by most Mac users. There isn't a legion of companies rushing cleanup tools out the door every day. Mac users are not in the habit of looking for such regardless.
A gargantuan software company (now defunct) had such a voicemail system in the early 1990s, allowing people to send voicemails as you would an email, and even address multiple people and groups. When used sparingly it was great. Unfortunately, the company developed a voicemail subculture among folk who couldn't or wouldn't type, and the tool was ruined. Imagine getting dozens of voicemails every day, from sales people, managers, and the CEO. Which ones can you ignore without getting fired? It's difficult to assess without listening to all of them. That burned over an hour a day, for each employee.
Many, many development shops which don't have the enormous global soapbox of Trent Reznor and NIN are still getting shafted explicitly and anally by Apple's backward app approval policies. They don't respond to our emails. They don't tell us why. iFlinger.
It's rather more mediocreap, crapedestrian, crapluster, or maybe, crap ci, crap ca. Downright Bush League, it was.
That is, if you have an 8th grade understanding of English.
Uh... the guy posted this shit to his blog. He works for the company he's bad mouthing. That's pretty stupid. It doesn't take much "evidence" beyond what the guy already provided. If Sun had many more employees of that caliber, it's little wonder they declined.
Flamebait? Flamebait? Moderator, Dudes. I'm serious abou this. Flamebait is stuff like... posting dirty laundry about your employer to your blog. The guy should be thoroughly debriefed about his full 10 points, and then fired.
Employees that are so stupid they think this kind of stunt is OK.
Uhm... it's a line drawn by anyone who designs chips and must pay someone else to build them. Like... anyone whose opinion on the topic matters.
Apple participated in the design of the PowerPC. That worked out pretty well. I've had two people tell me within the past week that they went back and used a PowerPC Mac Mini (both upgraded to 1GB of RAM) and how zippy it was under Leopard. They were surprised, since the systems were something like 5 years old, and max out at 1GB of RAM.
Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).
Apple is also a participant in LLVM, which is going to help Apple shorten the design-to-deployment cycle for new silicon.
It's going to work out just fine.
I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that Apple is planning to build their own fab.
You fail to consider that "cheap" and "inexpensive" need not be equivalent. Look at the history of the iPod. As technology advanced, Apple was able to fill in product offerings at lower price points with high quality offerings at low price points.
RoughlyDrafted.com fails to sufficiently address a few important factors. Apple can only address about 30% of the U.S. cell phone market with AT&T . Sure, a couple million customers migrate to AT&T every now and then, but there exists a certain amount of inertia in the market, plus, Verizon simply provides coverage in vast areas of the U.S. that AT&T totally ignores. Apple wants to sell iPhone to anyone who wants it.
It's inevitable that iPhone will, eventually, be available through more than one phone company in the U.S. Perhaps AT&T can make it interesting to Apple to continue their exclusive arrangement for a while, maybe even the full rumored five years from iPhone launch, but it's virtually impossible to justify continuing an exclusive arrangement after that. AT&T, for example, is not going to reciprocate by refraining from offer of BlackBerry products on AT&T now, are they? Nope. Apple would be ceding 70% of the market, indefinitely, if they didn't consider offering through other companies. This exclusive arrangement is really only useful to Apple during the early lifecycle of iPhone, say, the first two to three years for sure, fuzzy to five years. After that it becomes a liability, for Apple, no matter how appealing it is for AT&T.
All you puppies... you actually saw Linux *running* before you tried to use it. So cute!
You're fooling yourself. This could have been going on for years, and somebody just noticed because they installed an IDS upgrade, or turn on a new rule or something. The impression that the entire US government has their computer security ducks in a row is comforting, perhaps, but not really true.
IBM makes products that compete, no matter what segment of the IT industry a company is in. IBM also plays nicely with many of those companies, as IBM makes enormous amounts of revenue by introducing complexity into a customer environment, and providing consultants to glue it all together.
For example, IBM vends several databases already, including DB2 and Informix, yet they also provide IBM AIX servers to enterprise customers running Oracle on them.
Agreed. But it should be quite clear to anyone watching that Sun hasn't been able to figure out how to make money with this strategic commitment to open source. The new company might be able to find a workable middle ground. It doesn't seem likely, though, I agree.
Yes, this is exactly the reason why this could turn out to be an interesting merger. Most of the mergers of UNIX workstation vendors were not interesting, and essentially served to consolidate customer bases. An acquisition of Sun by IBM would have been like that. IBM had overlapping products, and this would have resulted in the end of life for both SPARC and Solaris.
Oracle and Sun, however, have complementary product lines. The potential certainly exists for a vibrant new company to emerge from this. It probably won't but at least this way there is a chance.
Next up, Oracle+Sun buys Yahoo!
No, IBM isn't kicking themselves. They are gleeful. They believe that Oracle+Sun will be an enormous destruction of shareholder value -- for somebody else's share holders.
Hrm... that posted Anonymous Coward. Wasn't intentional. Those were my thoughts, simple or flawed as they may be, I'm not ashamed of them.
Sun's multicore sparc work is basically custom designed to run giant database servers, and giant web servers with giant database back ends. Doing so at lower power draw than the competition has the potential to be a market winner. That alone will not be sufficient, however.