...would you nonetheless expect that there would be enough of them to make the expense of developing and marketing a virtual machine for Mac OS X pay off?
Assuming there was no possibility of licensing conflict and Apple was on board, I think there might be. Given the current situation, however, it certainly is not worth pissing off Apple or dealing with possible issues of contributory copyright infringement.
I also must say that your mention of OmniGraffle is a reflection of your excellent taste.
I can't take credit for that. I used it briefly then forgot about it until one of the managers for a development team I am working with decided he could not live without it and started using it extensively (his team is almost all on macs developing for Linux). It is a very slick tool and I'm pretty impressed with OmniGroup in general. If a few more developers had experience in the "Next" way of doing things and committed themselves to the mac platform I'd be a happy camper.
A user has had the ability to install stuff in her home directory on POSIX machines for oh... probably since POSIX machines have been around. This isn't a "Mac concept".
The original poster specifically mentioned copying bundles, which does somewhat suggest they were talking about OpenStep bundles that are installed with a drag and drop or copy and paste on OS X. Of course, you'll note I referred to them as OpenStep bundles, which do indeed predate OS X and were not invented by Apple. I do wish major Linux distros would extend the spec and adopt them though. They're bloody convenient and useful for desktop machines, especially for novice users and people who like to have portable apps or easy access to an application's resources.
If you install an RPM of unknown providence, you deserve what you get.
Realistically, this is not a good answer. OS's should provide a consistent mechanism for installing and managing software, not one method for software from the OS maker and one for commercial software (or none). Further, the assumption that any given piece of software can either be trusted or not is outdated and needs to die a quick death. All software on a machine should be limited by mandatory access controls and new software should be limited by a combination of an included ACL and a system assigned one based upon the trust level for that application.
I can forgive Linux distros and even OS X for not implementing this by default yet, since they do not have a real malware problem that actually affects most users, but this should have been implemented in Win2K at the latest, when everyone realized it was a serious problem in Windows.
The problem I have is that many people, including security people, assume that ease of use and security are polar opposites and it blinds them to real problems. If you require users to change their password every day you're reduced ease of use and security because you've motivated people to work around our security (possibly with post-it notes. There are plenty of real ways to increase the security of Windows and increase usability as well by providing users with more and better information and options as well as removing unneeded decisions. The worst part about all this, in my mind, is that MS as a monopoly is in the unique position of being able to enact sweeping reforms that require developers to adopt new practices to improve security, but MS doesn't do it.
And the Dept of Homeland security is doing what? exactly!
Probably re-imaging their insecure Windows boxes to try to clean up their own systems. How many directors of computer security have quit now after saying the job was impossible given the absurd Windows only architecture they implemented there?
1. Don't allow your users to send port 25 traffic to any address but your own mail server.
Repeat after me... the internet is not the web, the internet is not the web. I'd kind of rather ISPs did not arbitrarily block ports because one OS is so unbelievably insecure that it does not even inform users before it starts spamming e-mail to the world, when that is a common occurrence on that platform.
Here's a counter-suggestion. How about if MS gets off their butts and makes their OS reasonably secure so that it isn't easier to hijack Windows box and use it to send spam than it is to configure a proper e-mail server on that same OS. The assumption that all software run on a Windows machine should be trusted and allowed to do basically whatever it wants should have died long ago. Lets not treat symptoms by shutting down all the commonly used ports and protocols malware uses to perform malicious attacks, since that only makes it get around them by doing things like hijacking user's e-mail accounts to send the spam. Instead why don't we pressure MS to solve the bloody problem. In fact, I know exactly how to motivate them. It is called "the capitalist free market." Break MS into two companies forbidden from collusion and both with all the rights to the Windows code and patents to date. In three years both will have new version on the market and both will be reasonably secure because they will be motivated directly by greed to give customers what they want, including security. But I guess enforcing our existing laws against criminals is harder than passing a new law to castrate internet access for responsible users, huh?
The real problem is security models that assume very few levels of security. Either you install it and it can hose your machine and kill babies, or you don't run it and don't know if it was malware or not. That's just crazy. Back in the day MS Word used to pop up a dialogue box and say something along the lines of "this.doc file contains macros that may be viruses (ok)(cancel)." I knew a manger who offered $1000 to anyone who could add a button that said "open the file but don't let it infect my computer with anything." The problem, aside from the terrible UI, was the control was not granular enough. Sometimes people want to run software or open a file, but don't want to trust it with their computer security for all time. Software should run in a sandbox by default. The inconvenience of having to explicitly allow my new e-mail program to send e-mail, once is worth it if I know no other software I download will ever send any e-mail or access my address book until I explicitly permit it. Some executable that shows up in my e-mail or over IM should never, ever, be granted that permission by default. Until MS gets their head out of their butt and realizes that, we'll suffer from this crap.
They could simply prosecute the companies that are advertising their products via spam, after all they must have either directly been the originators of the spam, or at least know who they are funding to do the dirty work.
Great, then I can send spamvertisements for my competitor and they will be arrested. I can send spamvertisements for the company run by the jerk who is dating my ex-gf and he'll go to jail and she'll come to me for comfort. That's a great plan.
I'm sure any government could easily be able to determine who is ultimately behind spam, simply by buying some advertised product then either tracking the credit card transaction or by working out what the supply chain is from drug batch numbers on the product etc.
Really, how would they do this? Suppose I send spamvertisements for my competitor and a guy who sees one orders a product. His credit card pays my competitor who knew nothing of the spam and my competitor goes to jail for doing nothing. That sounds fair aside from the whole innocent until proven guilty thing.
Regardless of the operating system or the applications which run upon it, the ultimate weakness at the end of the day lies upon the end user. You can only secure a system to a certain point until the user begins losing functionality, until the end user becomes more educated...well expect to see evolution in Malware.
Your comment is factually correct, but also very misleading. Users are the hardest element to harden in the chain of security, but right now they are by no means the weakest link. The OS development community and security research community could easily eliminate 90% of all malware and reduce the amount of education needed for a user to safely use a computer to a tiny fraction of what they need to know now, if Windows would be modified in order to be secure and deal with the realities of the malware ecosystem.
Right now, even in vista, the granularity of security is piss poor. You have three levels: 1) don't run software, 2) run software, and 3) run software and enter your password. This is wholly insufficient. Further, the UI used to present these levels is abysmal. I don't mean bad I mean abysmal. Whether MS hires the worst UI people in the world or whether they hire good people and their decisions are overridden by marketing and management, the end result is horrible from a UI/security perspective.
If I was running the show at MS and had a shred of human decency and respect for innovation in the industry this is what I would create. First, applications both included and third party now have a new format that is contained within a single directory including temp space for writing files and what is now a DLL. It would optionally include an ACL, one or more certificates for verification of the origin and binary, and location for updates. Based upon the certificate, users would be given the option to subscribe to verification services that provide a trust level for a given application and MS would provide the same. The trust level for an application would be determined by the consensus of verifications applied and the weight given them by the user and if it is pre-installed, downloaded, or loaded from CD or DVD. Based upon that trust level, the application would be restricted by a mandatory access controls framework to obey the ACL that shipped with the program combined with the ACL for that trust level (with the default being to restrict the application more stringently). If any application wanted to exceed that ACL, the user would be presented with a very strongly worded warning, explaining exactly what it wanted and presented via a good UI with no OK/Cancel crap.
This means if a user downloads some program via IM or the Web and if they run it the OS will look at the included ACL and cert and see what permission it wants and who will certify it as trustworthy, if anyone. Then, if it tries to exceed its authority, the OS will present a warning such as, "The program 'Storm' is not verified as trustworthy and would like to connect to the internet on a port normally used for sending instant messages. (Stop it from sending messages)(let it send messages once)(always let it send messages)(advanced options)."
If the user lets it send IM messages it can spread, but do nothing else. They also have to explicitly let it connect on other ports and access other resources if it is to be useful to a spammer or DoS user. Since almost all software on most machines is pre-installed and since most other software will be verified by at least one other party, these messages will be exceptionally rare and thus stand out as important and weird to users. Even if the attacker uses a buffer overflow to take over a thread, their malware will still be limited by the ACL for that originating application, so if they want to send spam they better find a buffer overflow in your e-mail client specifically.
When such a system is implemented the required user education will be a manageable level, a hour long class instead of a master's degree in computer technology. Then, if a user stil
Any OS would is vunerable to an extent, since 90% of the problems are caused by the users allowing things to be installed. No OS can guard against that.
This is not true. Most problems are caused by people running software combined with the fallacious assumption by OS developers that software people run is trustworthy because the user is running it. An OS certainly can be created that accounts for running untrusted software and software with differing levels of trust and access. In fact, the bitfrost security outline for the OLPC project accounts for just such software. More commonly, SELinux setups account for software the user does not completely trust, albeit not in a user friendly way. If MS's was motivated to provide customers with a more secure and easy to use OS, they could have implemented mandatory access controls, a program format that incorporates ACLs, a framework for determining trust, and a well made GUI and stopped almost all malware on the platform. Instead they looked at the money anti-virus solutions are making cleaning up after them and thought, "gee, I'll bet we could put together a half-assed one of those and bundle it and make money." Don't judge what "OS's" can and can't do based upon Windows.
Wikipedia.org is a pretty well made site. It works fine in multiple browsers and is simple enough that most people understand it the first time they use it. I went and tried out the local news "wiki magazine" (called local.wikia.com) and was very disappointed. It was not at all intuitive or easy to find/contribute by comparison. It is sorted into sub categories, but the ability to add or edit articles was a distinct, different part of the UI. You click on an option in the "Share" section to add an article, instead of just going to the right section once you've specified a locality. Worse yet, using Safari, it automatically forwards you past the page where you specify the tile for the article using some javascript and it hangs the Safari browser when you actually submit a title.
Between the usability nightmare and the lack of cross-platform testing, it is clear these people are either not serious or are incompetent. I'll stick with one of the many pre-existing local news wikis, thanks. The name "Jimmy Wales" was the only reason I looked at this site. Congratulations, Mr. Wales, you've just tarnished your reputation by associating it with this garbage.
Censorship is the same, it is an all or nothing deal. Accept the tiniest amount and you accept censorship as a whole.
I disagree with this. Freedom of speech does not trump all other rights. Freedom of speech does not mean you can avoid prosecution for murder if you use a voice controlled weapon or that the police should not censor your speech in that case using a muzzle. It does not mean you are free to libel or slander others. It does not legitimize fraud or irresponsibly wrong advertisements.
Free speech rights can and do conflict with other basic human rights and it is appropriate to limit free speech when those rights trump it in the judgement of society. That said, I think in the case of "hate speech" and in the case of pornography the conflicting rights (if any exist) are of little consequence and do not justify restricting free speech to mitigate that conflict. I do, however, recognize the legitimacy of claiming such a conflict with free speech and am willing to accept that my assessment of human rights is not the same as everyone else's. With hate speech in particular I can see the argument, although I personally disagree with it.
then why is the agenda of most libertarian politics all about removing social safety nets?
Libertarianism the ideal or philosophy is about reducing laws to the subset that deal with conflicting rights. The political party in the US applies this in such a way that they don't recognize a human right to be given food or clothing or shelter or financial aid of any sort, while they do recognize a basic human right to own and keep property. As such, confiscating money using taxes from individuals and giving it to others conflicts with that philosophy. This is not selfishness, it simply places value on those recognized human rights above and beyond the good to society that social safety nets provide.
...they want freedom from society. they are selfish
This is not selfishness, just a different value system. What's more important freedom of religion or public subsidies for oil companies? Would you be willing to give up freedom of religion and become a southern baptist or a muslim in order to keep the government from cutting the funding they give to oil companies? If not, why not? Are you being selfish in that you'd rather have freedom of religion instead of paying taxes to the government who redistributes it? Obviously this is not the same thing as social security or healthcare versus the right to own property but the concept is the same.
I'm a pragmatist. I place more value on food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, and technological progress than I do on my unrestricted right to own property without interference. That doesn't mean I'm selfless either, it is simply different values on those aspects of life.
the freedom that libertarians seek has nothing to do with freedom of expression or freedom of religion
This is not technically true. Libertarianism as an ideal seeks to maximize personal freedom by removing laws that do not mediate a conflict of rights between individuals. For example, two consenting, unmarried men having consensual sex has no conflict of rights. Both parties are doing what they want freely. Some laws make that illegal anyway because members of a religion are trying to enforce their religious values on others. This is opposed by libertarianism the philosophy and the political party.
You repeat the same thing again and again, but it does not become any more convincing. I think you're confused as to the nature of libertarianism both as a philosophy and as a political party. It is no more selfish than any other political party. I just think you misunderstand the reasons behind the actions, so you attribute them to selfishness instead of a stronger importance on individual freedom. The Libertarian party advocates a lot of things I don't agree with and I'd not want them to control our government, but at the same time they do provide a balancing political force to the current parties who are overboard in the other direction and I regularly vote for Libertarian candidates.
Most of your comment is essentially correct regarding libertarianism as an ideal, although the political party in the US is something else.
What's more, they care about freedom so much that they respect it and respect other peoples right to enjoy their freedoms and live their lives however they choose, so long as they aren't hurting someone else.
This is incorrect, or perhaps, imprecise. Libertarians are against legislating morality. This is different from being in favor of freedom. With a little reflection anyone can see how one person's freedom can limit the freedom of someone else. Stealing does not "hurt anyone" but the freedom to take what you want conflicts with the freedom of others not to have their things taken. The idea of libertarianism is that the number and influence of laws should be minimized and that the only laws that are necessary are laws that resolve a conflict or rights between two people. Laws against stealing resolve the conflict between one person's right to own property and another person's right to take anything they want. Laws that forbid fornication between consenting adults are "legislating morality" because there is no conflict of rights. It is simply the law trying to let one group tell another group of people how to live. Libertarianism opposes this type of law. The right to speak out against a religion or race, is a conflict of rights, in that the right of one person to speak in any way they want may conflict with another person's right not to be slandered or intimidated. I think the right to speak freely should trump those other rights, but it is not an issue where a libertarian would necessarily choose one or the other based upon that philosophy.
Some people may need to run some particular application that only runs on OS X. There are such applications, like OmniGraffle. Some people may be doing development that targets both Windows and OS X and as such would like to be able to pull both of them up in VMs. Some people may wish to use OS X, but would like a more configurable security setup, or mostly need to run Linux apps as fast as possible, and would thus prefer to run OS X in a VM on Linux.
These are all valid use cases, but I'm not sure how common any of them are in the real world. Truthfully, the market for OS's that are not pre-installed is pretty small, especially if you're not targeting the enterprise business sector which is locked into Windows. No use of VMs or OS's that need to be installed by the user has any real impact on the desktop OS market.
The EULA says "Apple-labeled" not "apple-labeled." That means a computer labeled by Apple, not a computer labeled with an apple or even the Apple logo.
Come on. This is 2007. A government agency with classified data does not mandate encryption for their portables? It's been a built in feature for user accounts on OS X for more than three years now. It's been built in on OS X for an encrypted disk image for more than 7 years now. It's been available on Linux for longer yet and there have been third party tools for Windows to do this as long as I can remember.
Apple doesn't want to be in the software business, they want to be in the hardware business.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Apple makes some nice hardware and they're not about to abandon that market anytime soon. That said, OS X is their crown jewels and is the main reason to buy Apple hardware instead of some other brand. I'd say Apple is as much an OS development company as they are a hardware company, but the reality of the OS market is that MS has monopolized it and there is no reason to think that abetter OS competing in that market would win the market. All indications are, regardless of the relative quality and features of the OS introduced, competing directly against Windows will fail because of their market position. Apple sells hardware/software bundles, mostly because they have no choice if they want to exist as an OS manufacturer. In a competitive market they would be forced to unbundle the two and, in fact, they tried and failed in the past when they were ahead in the OS race.
It seems if you want to run whatever OS you want on your computer, you have to buy a Mac and Parallels (or VMWare Fusion) but personally I'd prefer a Linux host and OSX guest.
You could use the same free, emulation tools as are available on Linux as well, they just aren't very good by comparison to Parallels or VMWare and since the price is so low most people would rather have quality. Personally, I run Linux in a VM on top of OS X and it is a much more convenient to me in a number of ways. First, there is simply more software for OS X that I want to use, than there is for Linux. In Linux I run a handful of applications that don't play well on OS X (like Inkscape; I don't like the OS X version). I run a lot of applications that don't play well on Linux, at all, like Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver, a number of games, etc.
Also there are a number of core OS features on OS X that Linux is lacking. System services are a big one. On OS X I can use the same spellchecker, dictionary, thesaurus, online reference lookup, grammar checker, language translations, bibliography auto-formatting, word statistics, etc. in pretty much every application. If I'm going to be running most of my programs in a given OS, I'd rather it was the one not slowed down by emulation and it was the one with the most functionality across applications. Another big advantage is upgrading to new hardware. If I get a new laptop from work using OS X as the base system, I plug in a firewire cable, click a button, and go get coffee. Everything is copied for me and just works, including the Linux and Windows VMs. If Linux is the base system, I reinstall the base OS from scratch, recreate my accounts, copy over my home directories and a few other directories, replicate my partitions, and spend the next week looking up passwords for certs that did not get copied and tweaking preferences that were missed. It is better than Windows, but still several orders of magnitude more work than on OS X and requires a lot more hand holding.
Aside from those three main points, there are a lot of minor ones. There are a lot of features of OS X that exist in Linux, but are a huge pain to get working properly. There are some features in Linux that are missing from OS X, but they seem to be fewer and less important to me.
Actually that's a thought, would it be against EULA to run a virtualised OSX on a Mac running Linux, it's still Apple hardware.....?
From all I've heard this is legal, but VM vendors don't feel this market is significant in size, compared to the number of people who would use the technology to break the license agreement, opening them up to contributory copyright infringement lawsuits they would probably lose.
Isn't that just hypocritical of them? They tout one of the benefits of using a Mac is that they give you choices. You can run OSX or Windows and they imply that with a PC you don't have choices and can only run Windows. What they fail to mention is that this is not because of Windows or the PC but because Apple is placing the restriction themselves. Hello?!
What they write is perfectly true. You may consider it hypocritical to tout the ability to run OS X only on Apple hardware, but since they wrote the OS/environment, they get to license it. I chalk this up to one of the few realities of our broken market that works in Apple's favor. MS has a monopoly on desktop computers. As a result, you can't buy a computer from a major retailer (brick and mortar) without paying for Windows or OS X. A lot of software is written to only work on Windows. Government agencies require MS software to do business with them. All of these are the result of MS's monopoly, rather than inherent in the OS themselves. Another result of the monopoly is that Apple can't sell their OS unbundled from hardware without going out of business. Yeah, I know a lot of people who don't understand either the history of the market, or how monopolies influence a market wish this wasn't true and will argue that it isn't true because of that wishful thinking on their part. It is true.
Where does this leave us? It leaves us with a lot of negative aspects to buying a Mac that have nothing to do with OS X itself and everything to do with the market realities, and it leaves us with a few benefits to buying a Mac that are not inherent in the OS, but the result of the market realities. MS doesn't seem too shy about touting the negative consequences in their marketing, so I have no problem with Apple touting the positive consequences.
Notice anything about those solutions? They are not aimed at the consumer market, are not commercial enterprises, and are very limited in their ability. Creating software that can only be used legally in a weird edge case is one thing. Profiting by commercially marketing software that can only be used legally in an edge case is called "contributory copyright infringement." Now I can see the use case for OS X used legally in a VM (if you have Apple hardware and want to run OS X in a VM on top of some other OS, or if you live in a country with copyright laws that are different than the US). I can see arguments that contributory copyright infringement laws are a bad thing, and many of our other copyright laws are also negative for society. In this particular case, however, I do see the point of view from Apple. The market is dominated by a monopoly. Apple's best product would directly compete with that monopoly. Even if it is greatly superior, both recent history and the economics of monopolies show they will lose in that market if they try to compete. The classic strategy for competing against a monopoly is to build a separate vertical chain of supply the monopoly cannot undermine (hardware under your OS and apps on top of it). This is exactly what Apple has done.
Lots of people on Slashdot like to think Apple could abandon the tie between their OS and hardware and everyone would benefit. Those people mostly think that, not because they objectively looked at the market and understood it, but because they want it to be true because it would benefit them directly. It is not true. Unless MS's monopoly is broken up or ousted by tertiary market intrusions, Apple must maintain their tie in to survive. If EULAs are rendered null and void, Apple will stop selling their OS separately at all and probably start selling slightly more expensive boxes with a OS tied to a hardware signature and either sell upgrade versions (which suck) or provide free upgrades for some period of time, like 5 years. It is simply the reality of the market
For anyone out there who want Apple to stop tying their products, simply fixing the market will likely cause that to happen. Break MS into at least two competing companies, each with full rights to Windows, and in two or three years Apple will be forced to unbundle by the now competitive market and they will be able to do so without being killed. Problems like these are best solved at a higher level, rather than micro-managed.
what does that solve? Virusses run perfectly well on a VM too.
Viruses have a lot harder time of it when they have to re-infect your machine every time you quit and restart your Windows apps/VM. I use a VM for several Windows applications and they can read and write files to one directory shared with the rest of my OS. Aside from that, all changes are wiped every time I use those applications and it goes back to a known good copy. Occasionally, I'll boot the saved, known good copy and install the updates to it or change some setting and then save that copy of the VM as the new known good copy. In this way, the chances of being hit with malware are slim to none.
If you have not experienced this yet, just try getting off some anti-malware program's list. Try. Then try several more times. Go have a few drinks. Come back tomorrow and realize it is fruitless. Be prepared to answer a lot of phone calls and email saying "But it says it is spyware!!!"
Right, so your main tool for solving this is the court of public opinion. People can and do currently choose antivirus software from quite a few different options. Thus, even if they are not 100% convinced that their antivirus is wrong, they might try a different company's product next time in the hopes that they don't have to deal with it. At the same time if their antivirus is not finding anything, but they are experiencing problems because of malware, they can choose another company to compensate for false negatives.
The important point I was trying to convey was that MS's illegal venture into the anti-virus market will remove even this ability to enact change and will almost certainly remove any motivation for further innovation in the industry. The sad thing is that MS has a great opportunity for innovation here. If they just enacted an open standard for certification and verification of software (whitelist+blacklist) they could move this entire discussion to one about which verification companies provide the most accurate data. Further, the security community has been moving toward mandatory access controls for a while, which would both simplify the task of verifying software, and make it more valuable to end users. Picture this, you write an application and include an ACL that specifies what system resources it will access. A number of verification companies verify that ACL seems to be true and that none of that behavior is malicious. Each individual subscribers to one or more free and/or pay verification services (which can double as repositories for download and update in some cases) and base their trust of each application on the certifications and verifications they have for an application. It would be like having as many antivirus programs as you want voting on the credibility of an application and then actually doing something about that other than giving you the option to run it or not run it.
Trust is a value that must be earned. Some people place some trust inherently in those they are paying for a service. Why not make that process more effective and more flexible and more useful, instead of undermining it entirely?
In general I plan to give up on AV in the near future because (for the most part) it doesn't work well enough...
I have ClamAV installed. It never comes up with false positives, or negatives, or really anything at all.
My plan is to buy a system that is fast enough that everything (except for games) will be run on a virtual machine
I run Windows and Linux in VMs right now, on top of OS X. Most of my applications are native OS X ones, but the VMs are plenty fast for InkScape and OpenOffice and XPDF under Linux and Adobe Framemaker and IE under WinXP. The machine is a 2Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook. I do play the occasional game, OS X native ones. One of the nice things about this setup is that several companies are rushing to provide speedy gaming with emulation or virtualization. Parallels and VmWare have both announced they are working on graphics acceleration for direct hardware access for gaming, and several companies are working with WINE based re-implementations of the Windows APIs for running Windows native games quickly. Also, right now you can install a dual boot setup for Windows gaming and use the same partition for your VM when you don't feel like or need to reboot. I've never felt better about the security of my Windows setup, since I use a known clean version installed without internet access, every time I use it. As an added bonus, getting new hardware from work means I plug in a firewire cable, push a button, and go to lunch. When I come back all my user accounts, files, certs, settings, programs, etc. have been migrated, including my Linux and Windows VMs. It's the easiest way to move a Windows install to new hardware ever.
Right now, an antivirus company may list your software as adware because it matches some other software's behavior too closely or because your software was mistakenly classified as adware. Other malware detection systems may even start to classify your software incorrectly, taking their cue from their peer. So what can you do? You can write to the antivirus company(s) and ask them to fix their signatures. You can complain on forums and the like, especially informing your users that the antivirus is defective, hurting the reputation of that company and possibly driving users to better coded alternatives. This is far from ideal, but it could be worse.
MS has included and antivirus solution (defender) with Windows Vista. Since it is bundled with Vista and everyone who buys a new computer will find Vista pre-installed and with it Defender and they will have already paid for it by the time they find out about it, Defender will almost certainly become the most widespread solution, possibly completely taking over the home market, regardless of how good it is (failed to be certified due to too many incorrect classifications). This means within the next few years, it may be only one company you have to go to to get the signature fixed. That's the good news. The bad news is that they won't have any reason to respond quickly and won't have any motivation to not have false positive and negatives since they get paid when Windows is purchased and even if users abandon it and buy something else, they don't lose any money.
Now I'm not entirely opposed to MS providing a free anti-virus solution, but to comply with the law they have to bend over backwards to provide other companies the same access so as not to destroy the competitive market and create another situation like IE where the worst solution on the market is paid for and used by 80% of the populace and the state of technology advances only at a snail's pace.
From what I've seen, MS has not done that, so you can look forward to more false positives in the future with less chance of those classifications ever being corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming there was no possibility of licensing conflict and Apple was on board, I think there might be. Given the current situation, however, it certainly is not worth pissing off Apple or dealing with possible issues of contributory copyright infringement.
I also must say that your mention of OmniGraffle is a reflection of your excellent taste.
I can't take credit for that. I used it briefly then forgot about it until one of the managers for a development team I am working with decided he could not live without it and started using it extensively (his team is almost all on macs developing for Linux). It is a very slick tool and I'm pretty impressed with OmniGroup in general. If a few more developers had experience in the "Next" way of doing things and committed themselves to the mac platform I'd be a happy camper.
A user has had the ability to install stuff in her home directory on POSIX machines for oh... probably since POSIX machines have been around. This isn't a "Mac concept".
The original poster specifically mentioned copying bundles, which does somewhat suggest they were talking about OpenStep bundles that are installed with a drag and drop or copy and paste on OS X. Of course, you'll note I referred to them as OpenStep bundles, which do indeed predate OS X and were not invented by Apple. I do wish major Linux distros would extend the spec and adopt them though. They're bloody convenient and useful for desktop machines, especially for novice users and people who like to have portable apps or easy access to an application's resources.
If you install an RPM of unknown providence, you deserve what you get.
Realistically, this is not a good answer. OS's should provide a consistent mechanism for installing and managing software, not one method for software from the OS maker and one for commercial software (or none). Further, the assumption that any given piece of software can either be trusted or not is outdated and needs to die a quick death. All software on a machine should be limited by mandatory access controls and new software should be limited by a combination of an included ACL and a system assigned one based upon the trust level for that application.
I can forgive Linux distros and even OS X for not implementing this by default yet, since they do not have a real malware problem that actually affects most users, but this should have been implemented in Win2K at the latest, when everyone realized it was a serious problem in Windows.
Balancing Security with Ease of use...
The problem I have is that many people, including security people, assume that ease of use and security are polar opposites and it blinds them to real problems. If you require users to change their password every day you're reduced ease of use and security because you've motivated people to work around our security (possibly with post-it notes. There are plenty of real ways to increase the security of Windows and increase usability as well by providing users with more and better information and options as well as removing unneeded decisions. The worst part about all this, in my mind, is that MS as a monopoly is in the unique position of being able to enact sweeping reforms that require developers to adopt new practices to improve security, but MS doesn't do it.
And the Dept of Homeland security is doing what? exactly!
Probably re-imaging their insecure Windows boxes to try to clean up their own systems. How many directors of computer security have quit now after saying the job was impossible given the absurd Windows only architecture they implemented there?
1. Don't allow your users to send port 25 traffic to any address but your own mail server.
Repeat after me... the internet is not the web, the internet is not the web. I'd kind of rather ISPs did not arbitrarily block ports because one OS is so unbelievably insecure that it does not even inform users before it starts spamming e-mail to the world, when that is a common occurrence on that platform.
Here's a counter-suggestion. How about if MS gets off their butts and makes their OS reasonably secure so that it isn't easier to hijack Windows box and use it to send spam than it is to configure a proper e-mail server on that same OS. The assumption that all software run on a Windows machine should be trusted and allowed to do basically whatever it wants should have died long ago. Lets not treat symptoms by shutting down all the commonly used ports and protocols malware uses to perform malicious attacks, since that only makes it get around them by doing things like hijacking user's e-mail accounts to send the spam. Instead why don't we pressure MS to solve the bloody problem. In fact, I know exactly how to motivate them. It is called "the capitalist free market." Break MS into two companies forbidden from collusion and both with all the rights to the Windows code and patents to date. In three years both will have new version on the market and both will be reasonably secure because they will be motivated directly by greed to give customers what they want, including security. But I guess enforcing our existing laws against criminals is harder than passing a new law to castrate internet access for responsible users, huh?
The real problem is security models that assume very few levels of security. Either you install it and it can hose your machine and kill babies, or you don't run it and don't know if it was malware or not. That's just crazy. Back in the day MS Word used to pop up a dialogue box and say something along the lines of "this .doc file contains macros that may be viruses (ok)(cancel)." I knew a manger who offered $1000 to anyone who could add a button that said "open the file but don't let it infect my computer with anything." The problem, aside from the terrible UI, was the control was not granular enough. Sometimes people want to run software or open a file, but don't want to trust it with their computer security for all time. Software should run in a sandbox by default. The inconvenience of having to explicitly allow my new e-mail program to send e-mail, once is worth it if I know no other software I download will ever send any e-mail or access my address book until I explicitly permit it. Some executable that shows up in my e-mail or over IM should never, ever, be granted that permission by default. Until MS gets their head out of their butt and realizes that, we'll suffer from this crap.
They could simply prosecute the companies that are advertising their products via spam, after all they must have either directly been the originators of the spam, or at least know who they are funding to do the dirty work.
Great, then I can send spamvertisements for my competitor and they will be arrested. I can send spamvertisements for the company run by the jerk who is dating my ex-gf and he'll go to jail and she'll come to me for comfort. That's a great plan.
I'm sure any government could easily be able to determine who is ultimately behind spam, simply by buying some advertised product then either tracking the credit card transaction or by working out what the supply chain is from drug batch numbers on the product etc.
Really, how would they do this? Suppose I send spamvertisements for my competitor and a guy who sees one orders a product. His credit card pays my competitor who knew nothing of the spam and my competitor goes to jail for doing nothing. That sounds fair aside from the whole innocent until proven guilty thing.
Regardless of the operating system or the applications which run upon it, the ultimate weakness at the end of the day lies upon the end user. You can only secure a system to a certain point until the user begins losing functionality, until the end user becomes more educated...well expect to see evolution in Malware.
Your comment is factually correct, but also very misleading. Users are the hardest element to harden in the chain of security, but right now they are by no means the weakest link. The OS development community and security research community could easily eliminate 90% of all malware and reduce the amount of education needed for a user to safely use a computer to a tiny fraction of what they need to know now, if Windows would be modified in order to be secure and deal with the realities of the malware ecosystem.
Right now, even in vista, the granularity of security is piss poor. You have three levels: 1) don't run software, 2) run software, and 3) run software and enter your password. This is wholly insufficient. Further, the UI used to present these levels is abysmal. I don't mean bad I mean abysmal. Whether MS hires the worst UI people in the world or whether they hire good people and their decisions are overridden by marketing and management, the end result is horrible from a UI/security perspective.
If I was running the show at MS and had a shred of human decency and respect for innovation in the industry this is what I would create. First, applications both included and third party now have a new format that is contained within a single directory including temp space for writing files and what is now a DLL. It would optionally include an ACL, one or more certificates for verification of the origin and binary, and location for updates. Based upon the certificate, users would be given the option to subscribe to verification services that provide a trust level for a given application and MS would provide the same. The trust level for an application would be determined by the consensus of verifications applied and the weight given them by the user and if it is pre-installed, downloaded, or loaded from CD or DVD. Based upon that trust level, the application would be restricted by a mandatory access controls framework to obey the ACL that shipped with the program combined with the ACL for that trust level (with the default being to restrict the application more stringently). If any application wanted to exceed that ACL, the user would be presented with a very strongly worded warning, explaining exactly what it wanted and presented via a good UI with no OK/Cancel crap.
This means if a user downloads some program via IM or the Web and if they run it the OS will look at the included ACL and cert and see what permission it wants and who will certify it as trustworthy, if anyone. Then, if it tries to exceed its authority, the OS will present a warning such as, "The program 'Storm' is not verified as trustworthy and would like to connect to the internet on a port normally used for sending instant messages. (Stop it from sending messages)(let it send messages once)(always let it send messages)(advanced options)."
If the user lets it send IM messages it can spread, but do nothing else. They also have to explicitly let it connect on other ports and access other resources if it is to be useful to a spammer or DoS user. Since almost all software on most machines is pre-installed and since most other software will be verified by at least one other party, these messages will be exceptionally rare and thus stand out as important and weird to users. Even if the attacker uses a buffer overflow to take over a thread, their malware will still be limited by the ACL for that originating application, so if they want to send spam they better find a buffer overflow in your e-mail client specifically.
When such a system is implemented the required user education will be a manageable level, a hour long class instead of a master's degree in computer technology. Then, if a user stil
Any OS would is vunerable to an extent, since 90% of the problems are caused by the users allowing things to be installed. No OS can guard against that.
This is not true. Most problems are caused by people running software combined with the fallacious assumption by OS developers that software people run is trustworthy because the user is running it. An OS certainly can be created that accounts for running untrusted software and software with differing levels of trust and access. In fact, the bitfrost security outline for the OLPC project accounts for just such software. More commonly, SELinux setups account for software the user does not completely trust, albeit not in a user friendly way. If MS's was motivated to provide customers with a more secure and easy to use OS, they could have implemented mandatory access controls, a program format that incorporates ACLs, a framework for determining trust, and a well made GUI and stopped almost all malware on the platform. Instead they looked at the money anti-virus solutions are making cleaning up after them and thought, "gee, I'll bet we could put together a half-assed one of those and bundle it and make money." Don't judge what "OS's" can and can't do based upon Windows.
Wikipedia.org is a pretty well made site. It works fine in multiple browsers and is simple enough that most people understand it the first time they use it. I went and tried out the local news "wiki magazine" (called local.wikia.com) and was very disappointed. It was not at all intuitive or easy to find/contribute by comparison. It is sorted into sub categories, but the ability to add or edit articles was a distinct, different part of the UI. You click on an option in the "Share" section to add an article, instead of just going to the right section once you've specified a locality. Worse yet, using Safari, it automatically forwards you past the page where you specify the tile for the article using some javascript and it hangs the Safari browser when you actually submit a title.
Between the usability nightmare and the lack of cross-platform testing, it is clear these people are either not serious or are incompetent. I'll stick with one of the many pre-existing local news wikis, thanks. The name "Jimmy Wales" was the only reason I looked at this site. Congratulations, Mr. Wales, you've just tarnished your reputation by associating it with this garbage.
Censorship is the same, it is an all or nothing deal. Accept the tiniest amount and you accept censorship as a whole.
I disagree with this. Freedom of speech does not trump all other rights. Freedom of speech does not mean you can avoid prosecution for murder if you use a voice controlled weapon or that the police should not censor your speech in that case using a muzzle. It does not mean you are free to libel or slander others. It does not legitimize fraud or irresponsibly wrong advertisements.
Free speech rights can and do conflict with other basic human rights and it is appropriate to limit free speech when those rights trump it in the judgement of society. That said, I think in the case of "hate speech" and in the case of pornography the conflicting rights (if any exist) are of little consequence and do not justify restricting free speech to mitigate that conflict. I do, however, recognize the legitimacy of claiming such a conflict with free speech and am willing to accept that my assessment of human rights is not the same as everyone else's. With hate speech in particular I can see the argument, although I personally disagree with it.
then why is the agenda of most libertarian politics all about removing social safety nets?
Libertarianism the ideal or philosophy is about reducing laws to the subset that deal with conflicting rights. The political party in the US applies this in such a way that they don't recognize a human right to be given food or clothing or shelter or financial aid of any sort, while they do recognize a basic human right to own and keep property. As such, confiscating money using taxes from individuals and giving it to others conflicts with that philosophy. This is not selfishness, it simply places value on those recognized human rights above and beyond the good to society that social safety nets provide.
This is not selfishness, just a different value system. What's more important freedom of religion or public subsidies for oil companies? Would you be willing to give up freedom of religion and become a southern baptist or a muslim in order to keep the government from cutting the funding they give to oil companies? If not, why not? Are you being selfish in that you'd rather have freedom of religion instead of paying taxes to the government who redistributes it? Obviously this is not the same thing as social security or healthcare versus the right to own property but the concept is the same.
I'm a pragmatist. I place more value on food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, and technological progress than I do on my unrestricted right to own property without interference. That doesn't mean I'm selfless either, it is simply different values on those aspects of life.
the freedom that libertarians seek has nothing to do with freedom of expression or freedom of religion
This is not technically true. Libertarianism as an ideal seeks to maximize personal freedom by removing laws that do not mediate a conflict of rights between individuals. For example, two consenting, unmarried men having consensual sex has no conflict of rights. Both parties are doing what they want freely. Some laws make that illegal anyway because members of a religion are trying to enforce their religious values on others. This is opposed by libertarianism the philosophy and the political party.
You repeat the same thing again and again, but it does not become any more convincing. I think you're confused as to the nature of libertarianism both as a philosophy and as a political party. It is no more selfish than any other political party. I just think you misunderstand the reasons behind the actions, so you attribute them to selfishness instead of a stronger importance on individual freedom. The Libertarian party advocates a lot of things I don't agree with and I'd not want them to control our government, but at the same time they do provide a balancing political force to the current parties who are overboard in the other direction and I regularly vote for Libertarian candidates.
Most of your comment is essentially correct regarding libertarianism as an ideal, although the political party in the US is something else.
What's more, they care about freedom so much that they respect it and respect other peoples right to enjoy their freedoms and live their lives however they choose, so long as they aren't hurting someone else.
This is incorrect, or perhaps, imprecise. Libertarians are against legislating morality. This is different from being in favor of freedom. With a little reflection anyone can see how one person's freedom can limit the freedom of someone else. Stealing does not "hurt anyone" but the freedom to take what you want conflicts with the freedom of others not to have their things taken. The idea of libertarianism is that the number and influence of laws should be minimized and that the only laws that are necessary are laws that resolve a conflict or rights between two people. Laws against stealing resolve the conflict between one person's right to own property and another person's right to take anything they want. Laws that forbid fornication between consenting adults are "legislating morality" because there is no conflict of rights. It is simply the law trying to let one group tell another group of people how to live. Libertarianism opposes this type of law. The right to speak out against a religion or race, is a conflict of rights, in that the right of one person to speak in any way they want may conflict with another person's right not to be slandered or intimidated. I think the right to speak freely should trump those other rights, but it is not an issue where a libertarian would necessarily choose one or the other based upon that philosophy.
Some people may need to run some particular application that only runs on OS X. There are such applications, like OmniGraffle. Some people may be doing development that targets both Windows and OS X and as such would like to be able to pull both of them up in VMs. Some people may wish to use OS X, but would like a more configurable security setup, or mostly need to run Linux apps as fast as possible, and would thus prefer to run OS X in a VM on Linux.
These are all valid use cases, but I'm not sure how common any of them are in the real world. Truthfully, the market for OS's that are not pre-installed is pretty small, especially if you're not targeting the enterprise business sector which is locked into Windows. No use of VMs or OS's that need to be installed by the user has any real impact on the desktop OS market.
The EULA says "Apple-labeled" not "apple-labeled." That means a computer labeled by Apple, not a computer labeled with an apple or even the Apple logo.
Come on. This is 2007. A government agency with classified data does not mandate encryption for their portables? It's been a built in feature for user accounts on OS X for more than three years now. It's been built in on OS X for an encrypted disk image for more than 7 years now. It's been available on Linux for longer yet and there have been third party tools for Windows to do this as long as I can remember.
Apple doesn't want to be in the software business, they want to be in the hardware business.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Apple makes some nice hardware and they're not about to abandon that market anytime soon. That said, OS X is their crown jewels and is the main reason to buy Apple hardware instead of some other brand. I'd say Apple is as much an OS development company as they are a hardware company, but the reality of the OS market is that MS has monopolized it and there is no reason to think that abetter OS competing in that market would win the market. All indications are, regardless of the relative quality and features of the OS introduced, competing directly against Windows will fail because of their market position. Apple sells hardware/software bundles, mostly because they have no choice if they want to exist as an OS manufacturer. In a competitive market they would be forced to unbundle the two and, in fact, they tried and failed in the past when they were ahead in the OS race.
It seems if you want to run whatever OS you want on your computer, you have to buy a Mac and Parallels (or VMWare Fusion) but personally I'd prefer a Linux host and OSX guest.
You could use the same free, emulation tools as are available on Linux as well, they just aren't very good by comparison to Parallels or VMWare and since the price is so low most people would rather have quality. Personally, I run Linux in a VM on top of OS X and it is a much more convenient to me in a number of ways. First, there is simply more software for OS X that I want to use, than there is for Linux. In Linux I run a handful of applications that don't play well on OS X (like Inkscape; I don't like the OS X version). I run a lot of applications that don't play well on Linux, at all, like Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver, a number of games, etc.
Also there are a number of core OS features on OS X that Linux is lacking. System services are a big one. On OS X I can use the same spellchecker, dictionary, thesaurus, online reference lookup, grammar checker, language translations, bibliography auto-formatting, word statistics, etc. in pretty much every application. If I'm going to be running most of my programs in a given OS, I'd rather it was the one not slowed down by emulation and it was the one with the most functionality across applications. Another big advantage is upgrading to new hardware. If I get a new laptop from work using OS X as the base system, I plug in a firewire cable, click a button, and go get coffee. Everything is copied for me and just works, including the Linux and Windows VMs. If Linux is the base system, I reinstall the base OS from scratch, recreate my accounts, copy over my home directories and a few other directories, replicate my partitions, and spend the next week looking up passwords for certs that did not get copied and tweaking preferences that were missed. It is better than Windows, but still several orders of magnitude more work than on OS X and requires a lot more hand holding.
Aside from those three main points, there are a lot of minor ones. There are a lot of features of OS X that exist in Linux, but are a huge pain to get working properly. There are some features in Linux that are missing from OS X, but they seem to be fewer and less important to me.
Actually that's a thought, would it be against EULA to run a virtualised OSX on a Mac running Linux, it's still Apple hardware.....?
From all I've heard this is legal, but VM vendors don't feel this market is significant in size, compared to the number of people who would use the technology to break the license agreement, opening them up to contributory copyright infringement lawsuits they would probably lose.
Isn't that just hypocritical of them? They tout one of the benefits of using a Mac is that they give you choices. You can run OSX or Windows and they imply that with a PC you don't have choices and can only run Windows. What they fail to mention is that this is not because of Windows or the PC but because Apple is placing the restriction themselves. Hello?!
What they write is perfectly true. You may consider it hypocritical to tout the ability to run OS X only on Apple hardware, but since they wrote the OS/environment, they get to license it. I chalk this up to one of the few realities of our broken market that works in Apple's favor. MS has a monopoly on desktop computers. As a result, you can't buy a computer from a major retailer (brick and mortar) without paying for Windows or OS X. A lot of software is written to only work on Windows. Government agencies require MS software to do business with them. All of these are the result of MS's monopoly, rather than inherent in the OS themselves. Another result of the monopoly is that Apple can't sell their OS unbundled from hardware without going out of business. Yeah, I know a lot of people who don't understand either the history of the market, or how monopolies influence a market wish this wasn't true and will argue that it isn't true because of that wishful thinking on their part. It is true.
Where does this leave us? It leaves us with a lot of negative aspects to buying a Mac that have nothing to do with OS X itself and everything to do with the market realities, and it leaves us with a few benefits to buying a Mac that are not inherent in the OS, but the result of the market realities. MS doesn't seem too shy about touting the negative consequences in their marketing, so I have no problem with Apple touting the positive consequences.
Notice anything about those solutions? They are not aimed at the consumer market, are not commercial enterprises, and are very limited in their ability. Creating software that can only be used legally in a weird edge case is one thing. Profiting by commercially marketing software that can only be used legally in an edge case is called "contributory copyright infringement." Now I can see the use case for OS X used legally in a VM (if you have Apple hardware and want to run OS X in a VM on top of some other OS, or if you live in a country with copyright laws that are different than the US). I can see arguments that contributory copyright infringement laws are a bad thing, and many of our other copyright laws are also negative for society. In this particular case, however, I do see the point of view from Apple. The market is dominated by a monopoly. Apple's best product would directly compete with that monopoly. Even if it is greatly superior, both recent history and the economics of monopolies show they will lose in that market if they try to compete. The classic strategy for competing against a monopoly is to build a separate vertical chain of supply the monopoly cannot undermine (hardware under your OS and apps on top of it). This is exactly what Apple has done.
Lots of people on Slashdot like to think Apple could abandon the tie between their OS and hardware and everyone would benefit. Those people mostly think that, not because they objectively looked at the market and understood it, but because they want it to be true because it would benefit them directly. It is not true. Unless MS's monopoly is broken up or ousted by tertiary market intrusions, Apple must maintain their tie in to survive. If EULAs are rendered null and void, Apple will stop selling their OS separately at all and probably start selling slightly more expensive boxes with a OS tied to a hardware signature and either sell upgrade versions (which suck) or provide free upgrades for some period of time, like 5 years. It is simply the reality of the market
For anyone out there who want Apple to stop tying their products, simply fixing the market will likely cause that to happen. Break MS into at least two competing companies, each with full rights to Windows, and in two or three years Apple will be forced to unbundle by the now competitive market and they will be able to do so without being killed. Problems like these are best solved at a higher level, rather than micro-managed.
what does that solve? Virusses run perfectly well on a VM too.
Viruses have a lot harder time of it when they have to re-infect your machine every time you quit and restart your Windows apps/VM. I use a VM for several Windows applications and they can read and write files to one directory shared with the rest of my OS. Aside from that, all changes are wiped every time I use those applications and it goes back to a known good copy. Occasionally, I'll boot the saved, known good copy and install the updates to it or change some setting and then save that copy of the VM as the new known good copy. In this way, the chances of being hit with malware are slim to none.
If you have not experienced this yet, just try getting off some anti-malware program's list. Try. Then try several more times. Go have a few drinks. Come back tomorrow and realize it is fruitless. Be prepared to answer a lot of phone calls and email saying "But it says it is spyware!!!"
Right, so your main tool for solving this is the court of public opinion. People can and do currently choose antivirus software from quite a few different options. Thus, even if they are not 100% convinced that their antivirus is wrong, they might try a different company's product next time in the hopes that they don't have to deal with it. At the same time if their antivirus is not finding anything, but they are experiencing problems because of malware, they can choose another company to compensate for false negatives.
The important point I was trying to convey was that MS's illegal venture into the anti-virus market will remove even this ability to enact change and will almost certainly remove any motivation for further innovation in the industry. The sad thing is that MS has a great opportunity for innovation here. If they just enacted an open standard for certification and verification of software (whitelist+blacklist) they could move this entire discussion to one about which verification companies provide the most accurate data. Further, the security community has been moving toward mandatory access controls for a while, which would both simplify the task of verifying software, and make it more valuable to end users. Picture this, you write an application and include an ACL that specifies what system resources it will access. A number of verification companies verify that ACL seems to be true and that none of that behavior is malicious. Each individual subscribers to one or more free and/or pay verification services (which can double as repositories for download and update in some cases) and base their trust of each application on the certifications and verifications they have for an application. It would be like having as many antivirus programs as you want voting on the credibility of an application and then actually doing something about that other than giving you the option to run it or not run it.
Trust is a value that must be earned. Some people place some trust inherently in those they are paying for a service. Why not make that process more effective and more flexible and more useful, instead of undermining it entirely?In general I plan to give up on AV in the near future because (for the most part) it doesn't work well enough ...
I have ClamAV installed. It never comes up with false positives, or negatives, or really anything at all.
My plan is to buy a system that is fast enough that everything (except for games) will be run on a virtual machine
I run Windows and Linux in VMs right now, on top of OS X. Most of my applications are native OS X ones, but the VMs are plenty fast for InkScape and OpenOffice and XPDF under Linux and Adobe Framemaker and IE under WinXP. The machine is a 2Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook. I do play the occasional game, OS X native ones. One of the nice things about this setup is that several companies are rushing to provide speedy gaming with emulation or virtualization. Parallels and VmWare have both announced they are working on graphics acceleration for direct hardware access for gaming, and several companies are working with WINE based re-implementations of the Windows APIs for running Windows native games quickly. Also, right now you can install a dual boot setup for Windows gaming and use the same partition for your VM when you don't feel like or need to reboot. I've never felt better about the security of my Windows setup, since I use a known clean version installed without internet access, every time I use it. As an added bonus, getting new hardware from work means I plug in a firewire cable, push a button, and go to lunch. When I come back all my user accounts, files, certs, settings, programs, etc. have been migrated, including my Linux and Windows VMs. It's the easiest way to move a Windows install to new hardware ever.
Right now, an antivirus company may list your software as adware because it matches some other software's behavior too closely or because your software was mistakenly classified as adware. Other malware detection systems may even start to classify your software incorrectly, taking their cue from their peer. So what can you do? You can write to the antivirus company(s) and ask them to fix their signatures. You can complain on forums and the like, especially informing your users that the antivirus is defective, hurting the reputation of that company and possibly driving users to better coded alternatives. This is far from ideal, but it could be worse.
MS has included and antivirus solution (defender) with Windows Vista. Since it is bundled with Vista and everyone who buys a new computer will find Vista pre-installed and with it Defender and they will have already paid for it by the time they find out about it, Defender will almost certainly become the most widespread solution, possibly completely taking over the home market, regardless of how good it is (failed to be certified due to too many incorrect classifications). This means within the next few years, it may be only one company you have to go to to get the signature fixed. That's the good news. The bad news is that they won't have any reason to respond quickly and won't have any motivation to not have false positive and negatives since they get paid when Windows is purchased and even if users abandon it and buy something else, they don't lose any money.
Now I'm not entirely opposed to MS providing a free anti-virus solution, but to comply with the law they have to bend over backwards to provide other companies the same access so as not to destroy the competitive market and create another situation like IE where the worst solution on the market is paid for and used by 80% of the populace and the state of technology advances only at a snail's pace.
From what I've seen, MS has not done that, so you can look forward to more false positives in the future with less chance of those classifications ever being corrected.