.......So, WHY would The People bother doing any of that?......
A major reason was and still mostly is to shield individual owners from personal liability whenever employees or others connected with the company screw up and the company gets sued because of it. If you as an individual own a business and the business gets into trouble through a lawsuits or simply because of poor business decisions, you can lose not only the business and all of it assets, but creditors can also take your house, car and any property you personally have. If your business is a corporation, your personal assets are considered generally separate from the business assets or debts. This shielding allows business owners to take risks which may reward them or bankrupt then, but leave their personal property safe. This effect of risk taking is generally a desirable thing for the national economy as a whole. Americans, historically, in business and American banks are generally willing to take greater risks than their counterparts in other countries.
.....as long as I can prove it's not my signature.......
That's much easier to do with a physical signature, but much harder if a spybot stole your password and sent that to a crook who then withdraws your money. I was thinking primarily of the necessity to keep your password safe. The bank has no way of checking whether the password just entered was from you or the crook. With a signature, they can check your signature card.
...No signs warning me that I'll lose all my money......
There are no signs either that you could lose all your money if someone finds your wallet or bankbook somewhere. What is different about this? Just as you look out for you own security for your wallet, keys, bankbooks etc, you look out for it online. Make sure your computer is secure. One of the best ways to do this is NOT to use Windows. Use Linux or a Mac and you will be much safer. You can be a Microsoft lemming and suffer the fate of such, or you can go your own way and avoid the obvious security hole that Windows constitutes.
....The bank - who is an expert in security - has chosen to open their financial network to the internet at-large,.......
But you have also chosen or not chosen to accept their offer of online banking. Nobody twisted your arm. With the offer, both you and they are taking some risk. They tell you what risks they are willing to accept and you decide if that is worth it to you. If not, go to their nearest branch to do your banking as secure as it was before the Internet came along.
....Why would the bank have to take the blame if the user's machine is compromised?.....
Indeed, what is different about that than a lost or stolen wallet with credit cards and ID or a checkbook gone missing? Is the bank responsible for those also? Whatever happened to personal responsibility in our society? It seems like the tendency to blame others for individual misfortune must be curbed at some point.
....If they choose to connect their financial systems to the internet, thats THEIR choice........
If you choose to connect your computer to bank's computer via the Internet, thats your choice. They have the right to ask you to agree to whatever terms they want. If you don't want to agree, go to a different bank. If all banks require such agreements in order for you to connect to their computers, then just go down to see their tellers or ATM's in person and forget about the convenience of doing some or most of your banking from anyplace you can get an Internet connection. In that case you will have your precious privacy and the bank will not lose money to fraudsters through your faulty, compromised computer. Both you and they get what you want.
The agreement can include a specific clause where you give them the right to inspect your computer, WITHOUT them having to see a judge. Then if you refuse to abide by your express promise, they can cancel your account and/or sue you for a sizable sum.
....You don't piss off a company that can bankrupt you in litigation......
To make that harder there are these so called anti SLAPP laws. They can make it very problematic for a moneybags to use the courts and expensive litigation or even the threat of it. If a moneyed company has no case at all they can be in big doodoo for using the courts as a club to intimidate an innocent party. The fact that some mom and pop individuals are fighting back against the *IAA legal juggernauts is also a sign that punitive litigation is risky even for corporations with armies of lawyers at their disposal. Past success in no guarantee of future success.
.....A system that is running OS X and Windows apps is more difficult to secure and administer than a system just running Windows........
Only true for those users that need to access a Windows network server that OSX cannot reach. The VM uses Mac network settings and OSX can share files with Windows anyway. Macs also have a firewall that administrators can activate for further protection. A regular backup of the entire Windows VM will make it easy to repair a virus infected or otherwise broken Windows VM. Running Windows on a Mac makes sense only for users that need one or two Windows apps, but can do most of their work on the Mac.
.....versions of Vista that have license terms against virtualization......
All those license terms are pure BS. It would be like a car company making up a EULA that upon putting a key in the ignition you agree to only drive in the state you bought it in. The computer companies are making up rules that are no rules and apply nowhere else. My California car will run fine in any other state or even in Canada. VISTA will run fine in Parallels also. I doubt that MS could successfully sue Parallels for allowing Macs to run VISTA in equipment and ways contrary to MS's desires. Parallels has no contract or other relationship to MS. Their program allows OTHER programs to be used as well. Why should the pay any attention to MS legal wishes, which are unenforceable in the first place?
.......But people only buy that hardware because of Apple's software.......
If you had left out the word "only" you might have had a point. There are plenty of people who buy Apple iPods and soon the iphone who don't go anywhere near a Mac. There are some who appreciate the quality and thoughtful touches. Things like the magnetic power connector, two finger scrolling and illuminated keyboard for example. They would buy a Mac laptop, even if it came only with Windows.
.....Retail Home variants of Vista also aren't licensed for virtualization......
Who cares about what's licensed or not. Do you really think that 99.999% of buyers of a VISTA box will care or even look at what their box or dialog presents about agreeing to this or that? They will just install it if it will install. Unless MS can come up with a technical block that will prevent the program from working correctly in a VM, they can print the Harvard Law Library on their boxes for all the difference it would make. MS or anyone's licensing terms don't mean squat in the real world that everyone except lawyers inhabit, especially to consumers. If I were running a big business, I might pay just a tiny bit of attention to such "licenses".
........They freak out when you make a torrent and share.........
It only takes ONE person to put a decrypted copy on line. There will always be at least one person who is able to do this, no matter what technical or legal means are employed.
There was a little thing called prohibition in the first part of last century. It did not work and there we were dealing with a physical matter, which is much more easily discoverable than some ephemeral bits traversing invisibly through cyberspace. Laws have never prevented people from getting what they want. Look at the drug or gun laws. Anybody who wants *any* illegal substance or weapon can get one. If the new equipment prevents people from getting what they want, there will arise a thriving market in used computers and players. Also, the new crippled hardware will still be bypassed by someone and the content will appear in unencumbered form in cyberspace. Look at the complicated new DRM applied to the HD formats. It has already been broken and decrypted content is already available. Something that cannot work in theory can not be made to work in practice.
The makers of DRM technology have sold a bill of goods to the technically ignorant media executives who in turn have sold it to the politicians. Anyone here on/. who knows or has friendly contact with influential people in the industry should make an effort to educate these folks on the futility of DRM. iTunes has shown that there are plenty of people who are wiling to pay for content that can use pretty much as they want. There is still DRM, but it is not the DRM in itself that upsets the average Joe/Jane, as long as the content will play in the devices he/she wants. There are a number of tools currently illegal in the US, that allow anyone who wants to, put any DVD onto their iPod. If there is a demand for that sort of ability, no amount of DRM or laws will stop that demand from being met.
....Not allowing virtualization because someone can share a multi-GB VM.....
Other than a useless EULA, is there any technical method they could implement to prevent their OS from running in a VM? EULA's are meaningless unenforceable garbage anyway. Are they going to send the cops around to see if I have VISTA installed running under Parallels on my Mac?
..... secure in our belief that DRM'd hardware can't work......
DRM can never work, whether based in hardware of software or any other "ware". DRM is security by obscurity, that is secrets. I send you an encrypted message which I want you to read. So I send you the key by which you are able to read it. Now while you are reading it I try to make sure nobody is looking over your shoulder and also reading it and even taking a picture of it. Now the message is readable by anybody, anywhere.
In a few years DRM will be dead. EMI is already learning that the new DRM free material they have made available on iTunes is selling rather well. Soon the other content providers will figure it out also. When the VCR was invented the movie moguls tried to get declared illegal. That failed and they all have since made mountains of money from selling and renting recorded movies. The Internet is just another distribution system. They'll figure that out sometime and make another mountain of cash.
.......would certainly make for some interesting legal arguments......
Phone and network providers are also shielded from liability over what content is carried over their wires. If they start modifying the content, then they are no longer mere CARRIERS but can be held liable as content originators. Someone can then argue that they should not have allowed certain material, since it contains damaging material to children or libelous untruths. Any ISP contemplating doing this ad injecting content modification better check with a good lawyer.
.....In a remotely competently managed Windows environment, this should be exactly what happens.....
The key words are competently managed. When I was IT manager at our school district, that is exactly what I did for almost all computers. We were running NT4 back then. Windows can be made quite secure actually. How many consumer computers are competently managed? Macs are MUCH more secure out of the box. Now with VISTA, that aspect of Windows certainly seems to have changed for the better. The price however is a considerable increase in hardware requirements. With Windows each succeeding generation has been slower on the same hardware. Mac OSX 10.4 still works acceptably well on my old G4 with 512M of memory. It runs faster on that than the 10.1 it shipped with. In practice however, VISTA's steep hardware requirements won't be too troublesome, since it will mostly come installed on new hardware with enough power to run it well. I installed VISTA Home premium as a VM on my Mac, just so I could learn about it. It is considerably slower than the XP VM on the same machine.
.....if you can get the user to run the program once......
That's called social engineering and against that there is no technological defense. I am a fairly knowledgeable Mac and Windows user, but am not intimately acquainted with the intricate innards of either. Since there is a LOT more software for Windows, both good and bad than for the Mac, the tools for invading a Windows box are plentiful and sophisticated. Even if Macs suddenly had 25%-50% market share, the hacking tools would still need to be developed. Since developing such tools is considerably more difficult for Macs than for Windows, the amount of malware for Macs will always be much less.
Because of compatibility, many Windows programs, including malware and hacking tools, will still work in VISTA. I do believe however, that the days of the large scale "blaster" type rapidly proliferating worms are over.
.....All your arguments could have been said about Firefox as well......
Except that Firefox is only an application, not a whole OS. Which version of Firefox is subject to all that malware? Is it the Windows version or the Mac/Linux versions? If the underlying OS is more hackable, then its applications will be also. Every time there is a story about a major worm or virus, a little phrase is buried somewhere in the media stating that Macs and Linux are not affected. If the OS is secure, then its apps have a better chance to be also.
....If your malware doesn't make it's presence obvious (say, by crashing a lot or spawning pop ups) you could go unnoticed on the typical Mac for quite some time........
If your malware wants to gets itself run every time the computer started it would have to get sudo rights to install itself. That requires an admin password. If the password is given, then the malware can install. Many users, in schools for example, don't know that password. In that case the malware can only access user space. The system startup file is outside of that and there is no registry where the worm can insure that it runs on a re-boot. Any malware can therefore only run that one time the user actually starts it. It can at that time access any user file, which of course is bad enough. In summary then: To make a worm for a Mac is much harder compared to Windows. Even when a worm does get in, it is much easier to find and eradicate, because in the Mac file system there are fewer places to hide. Only software that needs to and is given special permissions to install drivers, needs some sort of uninstall programs such as almost every Windows program needs. On Macs the program is simply dragged to the trash and ALL of it is gone forever.
It is likely that Mac users may be more affluent, but they may also just be more concerned with cost of ownership over the longer term, rather that first cost. In that department, Macs are generally less costly. The hacking difficulty of a Mac, especially in the absence of readily available hacking tools, is proportionately much higher than Windows. Even a simple NAT router is somewhat effective as a firewall. Most Cable/DSL setups use these. This precludes many attacks from the outside Internet. Macs also have a built in firewall which is however not turned on out of the box.
.......I can guarantee you that if MacOS had 15% market share there'd be people out there attacking it, and succeeding........
My goodness, you must be clairvoyant about the future! Maybe you should be a stock analyst! I don't know the future any more than you do, but I know a little about human nature.
It's not just that there are fewer Macs, but also that the vast majority of hackers have lot of experience in how to break into Windows boxes. There are lots of tools around to help them break into those. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they would get honest jobs. Learning all about how Macs work and building hacking tools, in order to break into them is a lot of work. The absence of easy to use Mac hacking tools also eliminates the army of script kiddies from turning their attention on Macs. So even if there were an equal number of Macs and Windows systems, there would have to be a much stronger incentive to break into a Mac than a Windows box. Can you point to such an incentive?
If a hacker can mess up the registry, more damage can be done to the whole computer than in *NIX systems where critical information is more distributed. It is not all concentrated in a single file, especially one that many present programs, for no reason, want write access to.
I know of Windows programs which will not run properly unless the user is and administrator. There are NO Mac programs I know of that require the user to have admin privileges. Ordinary users, such as kids in school do not even know the admin password. So exactly what do you mean with: "the inherently less secure design OS X has incorporating a superuser"?
If the situation became reversed in Windows and Mac numbers, then the scale would have tipped, true. That is however highly unlikely. Discussing "what if" scenarios is mostly foolish fun. Getting back to reality is the fact that Macs have essentially zero amounts of malware circulating in the present Internet, compared to tens of thousands or more attacks on Windows systems each and every day. That fact can safely be told to future computer buyers TODAY. Tomorrow that may change, but let tomorrow come first.
.....The case of Firefox seems to show that around 10-12% market share is when you get interesting to attackers......
So which version of Firefox gets hacked? The Windows version or the Linux/Mac versions? Hackers know how to hack Windows and its apps, but few of them know much, if anything about Macs. There are also few hacking tools out there for script kiddies to use. Hackers are lazy. Even with 50% Macs, they would be hacked much less than Windows machines because to to so is much more work. If hackers wanted to work, they would get real, honest jobs.
.... The more people who switch to Apple computers, the more dangerous they are to use.......
Not true. Even if 50% of all computer were Macs, the number of Mac hacks would not rise dramatically. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they'd get real jobs. If you were a hacker, which half of all computers would you rather attack? The easy half you know and have hacking tools for, or the other half for which you have nothing and are inherently harder to crack? There is no reason to assume that a hacked Mac would be more valuable to a criminal wanting to steal your private data than a hacked Windows system.
Slashdot Mirror
.......So, WHY would The People bother doing any of that?......
A major reason was and still mostly is to shield individual owners from personal liability whenever employees or others connected with the company screw up and the company gets sued because of it. If you as an individual own a business and the business gets into trouble through a lawsuits or simply because of poor business decisions, you can lose not only the business and all of it assets, but creditors can also take your house, car and any property you personally have. If your business is a corporation, your personal assets are considered generally separate from the business assets or debts. This shielding allows business owners to take risks which may reward them or bankrupt then, but leave their personal property safe. This effect of risk taking is generally a desirable thing for the national economy as a whole. Americans, historically, in business and American banks are generally willing to take greater risks than their counterparts in other countries.
.....as long as I can prove it's not my signature.......
That's much easier to do with a physical signature, but much harder if a spybot stole your password and sent that to a crook who then withdraws your money. I was thinking primarily of the necessity to keep your password safe. The bank has no way of checking whether the password just entered was from you or the crook. With a signature, they can check your signature card.
...No signs warning me that I'll lose all my money......
There are no signs either that you could lose all your money if someone finds your wallet or bankbook somewhere. What is different about this? Just as you look out for you own security for your wallet, keys, bankbooks etc, you look out for it online. Make sure your computer is secure. One of the best ways to do this is NOT to use Windows. Use Linux or a Mac and you will be much safer. You can be a Microsoft lemming and suffer the fate of such, or you can go your own way and avoid the obvious security hole that Windows constitutes.
....The bank - who is an expert in security - has chosen to open their financial network to the internet at-large,.......
But you have also chosen or not chosen to accept their offer of online banking. Nobody twisted your arm. With the offer, both you and they are taking some risk. They tell you what risks they are willing to accept and you decide if that is worth it to you. If not, go to their nearest branch to do your banking as secure as it was before the Internet came along.
....Why would the bank have to take the blame if the user's machine is compromised?.....
Indeed, what is different about that than a lost or stolen wallet with credit cards and ID or a checkbook gone missing? Is the bank responsible for those also? Whatever happened to personal responsibility in our society? It seems like the tendency to blame others for individual misfortune must be curbed at some point.
....If they choose to connect their financial systems to the internet, thats THEIR choice........
If you choose to connect your computer to bank's computer via the Internet, thats your choice. They have the right to ask you to agree to whatever terms they want. If you don't want to agree, go to a different bank. If all banks require such agreements in order for you to connect to their computers, then just go down to see their tellers or ATM's in person and forget about the convenience of doing some or most of your banking from anyplace you can get an Internet connection. In that case you will have your precious privacy and the bank will not lose money to fraudsters through your faulty, compromised computer. Both you and they get what you want.
The agreement can include a specific clause where you give them the right to inspect your computer, WITHOUT them having to see a judge. Then if you refuse to abide by your express promise, they can cancel your account and/or sue you for a sizable sum.
....You don't piss off a company that can bankrupt you in litigation......
To make that harder there are these so called anti SLAPP laws. They can make it very problematic for a moneybags to use the courts and expensive litigation or even the threat of it. If a moneyed company has no case at all they can be in big doodoo for using the courts as a club to intimidate an innocent party. The fact that some mom and pop individuals are fighting back against the *IAA legal juggernauts is also a sign that punitive litigation is risky even for corporations with armies of lawyers at their disposal. Past success in no guarantee of future success.
.....A system that is running OS X and Windows apps is more difficult to secure and administer than a system just running Windows........
Only true for those users that need to access a Windows network server that OSX cannot reach. The VM uses Mac network settings and OSX can share files with Windows anyway. Macs also have a firewall that administrators can activate for further protection. A regular backup of the entire Windows VM will make it easy to repair a virus infected or otherwise broken Windows VM. Running Windows on a Mac makes sense only for users that need one or two Windows apps, but can do most of their work on the Mac.
.....This licensing will probably help ......
Since most people don't pay attention to licensing, but just tear the box open and click "agree", it won't make any difference either way.
.....versions of Vista that have license terms against virtualization......
All those license terms are pure BS. It would be like a car company making up a EULA that upon putting a key in the ignition you agree to only drive in the state you bought it in. The computer companies are making up rules that are no rules and apply nowhere else. My California car will run fine in any other state or even in Canada. VISTA will run fine in Parallels also. I doubt that MS could successfully sue Parallels for allowing Macs to run VISTA in equipment and ways contrary to MS's desires. Parallels has no contract or other relationship to MS. Their program allows OTHER programs to be used as well. Why should the pay any attention to MS legal wishes, which are unenforceable in the first place?
.......But people only buy that hardware because of Apple's software.......
If you had left out the word "only" you might have had a point. There are plenty of people who buy Apple iPods and soon the iphone who don't go anywhere near a Mac. There are some who appreciate the quality and thoughtful touches. Things like the magnetic power connector, two finger scrolling and illuminated keyboard for example. They would buy a Mac laptop, even if it came only with Windows.
.....Retail Home variants of Vista also aren't licensed for virtualization......
Who cares about what's licensed or not. Do you really think that 99.999% of buyers of a VISTA box will care or even look at what their box or dialog presents about agreeing to this or that? They will just install it if it will install. Unless MS can come up with a technical block that will prevent the program from working correctly in a VM, they can print the Harvard Law Library on their boxes for all the difference it would make. MS or anyone's licensing terms don't mean squat in the real world that everyone except lawyers inhabit, especially to consumers. If I were running a big business, I might pay just a tiny bit of attention to such "licenses".
........They freak out when you make a torrent and share .........
/. who knows or has friendly contact with influential people in the industry should make an effort to educate these folks on the futility of DRM. iTunes has shown that there are plenty of people who are wiling to pay for content that can use pretty much as they want. There is still DRM, but it is not the DRM in itself that upsets the average Joe/Jane, as long as the content will play in the devices he/she wants. There are a number of tools currently illegal in the US, that allow anyone who wants to, put any DVD onto their iPod. If there is a demand for that sort of ability, no amount of DRM or laws will stop that demand from being met.
It only takes ONE person to put a decrypted copy on line. There will always be at least one person who is able to do this, no matter what technical or legal means are employed.
There was a little thing called prohibition in the first part of last century. It did not work and there we were dealing with a physical matter, which is much more easily discoverable than some ephemeral bits traversing invisibly through cyberspace. Laws have never prevented people from getting what they want. Look at the drug or gun laws. Anybody who wants *any* illegal substance or weapon can get one. If the new equipment prevents people from getting what they want, there will arise a thriving market in used computers and players. Also, the new crippled hardware will still be bypassed by someone and the content will appear in unencumbered form in cyberspace. Look at the complicated new DRM applied to the HD formats. It has already been broken and decrypted content is already available. Something that cannot work in theory can not be made to work in practice.
The makers of DRM technology have sold a bill of goods to the technically ignorant media executives who in turn have sold it to the politicians. Anyone here on
....Not allowing virtualization because someone can share a multi-GB VM.....
Other than a useless EULA, is there any technical method they could implement to prevent their OS from running in a VM? EULA's are meaningless unenforceable garbage anyway. Are they going to send the cops around to see if I have VISTA installed running under Parallels on my Mac?
..... secure in our belief that DRM'd hardware can't work......
DRM can never work, whether based in hardware of software or any other "ware". DRM is security by obscurity, that is secrets. I send you an encrypted message which I want you to read. So I send you the key by which you are able to read it. Now while you are reading it I try to make sure nobody is looking over your shoulder and also reading it and even taking a picture of it. Now the message is readable by anybody, anywhere.
In a few years DRM will be dead. EMI is already learning that the new DRM free material they have made available on iTunes is selling rather well. Soon the other content providers will figure it out also. When the VCR was invented the movie moguls tried to get declared illegal. That failed and they all have since made mountains of money from selling and renting recorded movies. The Internet is just another distribution system. They'll figure that out sometime and make another mountain of cash.
.......would certainly make for some interesting legal arguments......
Phone and network providers are also shielded from liability over what content is carried over their wires. If they start modifying the content, then they are no longer mere CARRIERS but can be held liable as content originators. Someone can then argue that they should not have allowed certain material, since it contains damaging material to children or libelous untruths. Any ISP contemplating doing this ad injecting content modification better check with a good lawyer.
.....In a remotely competently managed Windows environment, this should be exactly what happens.....
The key words are competently managed. When I was IT manager at our school district, that is exactly what I did for almost all computers. We were running NT4 back then. Windows can be made quite secure actually. How many consumer computers are competently managed? Macs are MUCH more secure out of the box. Now with VISTA, that aspect of Windows certainly seems to have changed for the better. The price however is a considerable increase in hardware requirements. With Windows each succeeding generation has been slower on the same hardware. Mac OSX 10.4 still works acceptably well on my old G4 with 512M of memory. It runs faster on that than the 10.1 it shipped with. In practice however, VISTA's steep hardware requirements won't be too troublesome, since it will mostly come installed on new hardware with enough power to run it well. I installed VISTA Home premium as a VM on my Mac, just so I could learn about it. It is considerably slower than the XP VM on the same machine.
.....if you can get the user to run the program once ......
That's called social engineering and against that there is no technological defense. I am a fairly knowledgeable Mac and Windows user, but am not intimately acquainted with the intricate innards of either. Since there is a LOT more software for Windows, both good and bad than for the Mac, the tools for invading a Windows box are plentiful and sophisticated. Even if Macs suddenly had 25%-50% market share, the hacking tools would still need to be developed. Since developing such tools is considerably more difficult for Macs than for Windows, the amount of malware for Macs will always be much less.
Because of compatibility, many Windows programs, including malware and hacking tools, will still work in VISTA. I do believe however, that the days of the large scale "blaster" type rapidly proliferating worms are over.
.....All your arguments could have been said about Firefox as well......
Except that Firefox is only an application, not a whole OS. Which version of Firefox is subject to all that malware? Is it the Windows version or the Mac/Linux versions? If the underlying OS is more hackable, then its applications will be also. Every time there is a story about a major worm or virus, a little phrase is buried somewhere in the media stating that Macs and Linux are not affected. If the OS is secure, then its apps have a better chance to be also.
....If your malware doesn't make it's presence obvious (say, by crashing a lot or spawning pop ups) you could go unnoticed on the typical Mac for quite some time........
If your malware wants to gets itself run every time the computer started it would have to get sudo rights to install itself. That requires an admin password. If the password is given, then the malware can install. Many users, in schools for example, don't know that password. In that case the malware can only access user space. The system startup file is outside of that and there is no registry where the worm can insure that it runs on a re-boot. Any malware can therefore only run that one time the user actually starts it. It can at that time access any user file, which of course is bad enough. In summary then: To make a worm for a Mac is much harder compared to Windows. Even when a worm does get in, it is much easier to find and eradicate, because in the Mac file system there are fewer places to hide. Only software that needs to and is given special permissions to install drivers, needs some sort of uninstall programs such as almost every Windows program needs. On Macs the program is simply dragged to the trash and ALL of it is gone forever.
It is likely that Mac users may be more affluent, but they may also just be more concerned with cost of ownership over the longer term, rather that first cost. In that department, Macs are generally less costly. The hacking difficulty of a Mac, especially in the absence of readily available hacking tools, is proportionately much higher than Windows. Even a simple NAT router is somewhat effective as a firewall. Most Cable/DSL setups use these. This precludes many attacks from the outside Internet. Macs also have a built in firewall which is however not turned on out of the box.
.......I can guarantee you that if MacOS had 15% market share there'd be people out there attacking it, and succeeding........
My goodness, you must be clairvoyant about the future! Maybe you should be a stock analyst! I don't know the future any more than you do, but I know a little about human nature.
It's not just that there are fewer Macs, but also that the vast majority of hackers have lot of experience in how to break into Windows boxes. There are lots of tools around to help them break into those. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they would get honest jobs. Learning all about how Macs work and building hacking tools, in order to break into them is a lot of work. The absence of easy to use Mac hacking tools also eliminates the army of script kiddies from turning their attention on Macs. So even if there were an equal number of Macs and Windows systems, there would have to be a much stronger incentive to break into a Mac than a Windows box. Can you point to such an incentive?
.......How so ?.....
If a hacker can mess up the registry, more damage can be done to the whole computer than in *NIX systems where critical information is more distributed. It is not all concentrated in a single file, especially one that many present programs, for no reason, want write access to.
I know of Windows programs which will not run properly unless the user is and administrator. There are NO Mac programs I know of that require the user to have admin privileges. Ordinary users, such as kids in school do not even know the admin password. So exactly what do you mean with: "the inherently less secure design OS X has incorporating a superuser"?
But once that scale tips, it would be
If the situation became reversed in Windows and Mac numbers, then the scale would have tipped, true. That is however highly unlikely. Discussing "what if" scenarios is mostly foolish fun. Getting back to reality is the fact that Macs have essentially zero amounts of malware circulating in the present Internet, compared to tens of thousands or more attacks on Windows systems each and every day. That fact can safely be told to future computer buyers TODAY. Tomorrow that may change, but let tomorrow come first.
.....The case of Firefox seems to show that around 10-12% market share is when you get interesting to attackers......
So which version of Firefox gets hacked? The Windows version or the Linux/Mac versions? Hackers know how to hack Windows and its apps, but few of them know much, if anything about Macs. There are also few hacking tools out there for script kiddies to use. Hackers are lazy. Even with 50% Macs, they would be hacked much less than Windows machines because to to so is much more work. If hackers wanted to work, they would get real, honest jobs.
.... The more people who switch to Apple computers, the more dangerous they are to use.......
Not true. Even if 50% of all computer were Macs, the number of Mac hacks would not rise dramatically. Hackers are lazy, otherwise they'd get real jobs. If you were a hacker, which half of all computers would you rather attack? The easy half you know and have hacking tools for, or the other half for which you have nothing and are inherently harder to crack? There is no reason to assume that a hacked Mac would be more valuable to a criminal wanting to steal your private data than a hacked Windows system.