A) You ask me why there hasn't been a major Mac virus when my whole point is to explain why there hasn't been a major Mac virus.
B.1) Native Americans might not catch colds if they weren't human beings.
B.2) Looking beyond the fact that they do not need some kind of radically different virus to get a cold, Native Americans originally lived amongst themselves (100% homogeneity, not 3%) and today often live on Native-only reserves. However, in this hypothetical situation the ones living as a small minority in a city would get very few colds.
Anyhow, if you want a better explanation you should check out just about any book on epidemiology, or that popular 'The Tipping Point' by M. Gladwell. Books on chaos theory will also often discuss epidemiology in a relevant manner.
Once your virus is on a Mac, it then needs to propagate. If only 2-3% of the machines around it are Macs (and perhaps only a fraction of those are vulnerable) then it is much harder for the virus to reach critical mass. (The 'Tipping Point', as the book by the same name describes)
In an environment where 40% of the machines are macs there is a considerable risk, so I think that Mr. Borrie is right to try to take preventative measures.
As far as the inherent security of Macs, it cannot defeat user stupidity, so that point is rather moot, IMO. Most of the serious virus epidemics seem to be email or web based these days.
To drive the point home, let's look at how a virus might make it onto the mac: you email it to a number of mac users (grabbing their emails from some mac fan site). Only a small percentage of them will actually open the attachment or visit the link (although the percentage will probably be higher than for today's Windows users). The virus propagates itself by going out to every person in the address book. (Accessing the user's address book doesn't require root privileges, AFAIK:P)
Anyhow, now the tricky part arrives: how many of people in the average Mac user's address book are themselves Mac users? If (as I suspect) the average is close to the usual 2-3% then the virus fails to reach critical mass (How many people do you have in your address book? I have a few dozen at most). If, on the other hand, Mac users have a high proportion (40%?) of mac using friends, then you might be in luck.
I can think of a way or two around this, but the difficulty lies in dealing with the small % of mac users rather than in trying to find a flaw in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry my explanation wasn't clear enough.
A) You ask me why there hasn't been a major Mac virus when my whole point is to explain why there hasn't been a major Mac virus.
B.1) Native Americans might not catch colds if they weren't human beings.
B.2) Looking beyond the fact that they do not need some kind of radically different virus to get a cold, Native Americans originally lived amongst themselves (100% homogeneity, not 3%) and today often live on Native-only reserves. However, in this hypothetical situation the ones living as a small minority in a city would get very few colds.
Anyhow, if you want a better explanation you should check out just about any book on epidemiology, or that popular 'The Tipping Point' by M. Gladwell. Books on chaos theory will also often discuss epidemiology in a relevant manner.
Once your virus is on a Mac, it then needs to propagate. If only 2-3% of the machines around it are Macs (and perhaps only a fraction of those are vulnerable) then it is much harder for the virus to reach critical mass. (The 'Tipping Point', as the book by the same name describes)
:P)
In an environment where 40% of the machines are macs there is a considerable risk, so I think that Mr. Borrie is right to try to take preventative measures.
As far as the inherent security of Macs, it cannot defeat user stupidity, so that point is rather moot, IMO. Most of the serious virus epidemics seem to be email or web based these days.
To drive the point home, let's look at how a virus might make it onto the mac: you email it to a number of mac users (grabbing their emails from some mac fan site). Only a small percentage of them will actually open the attachment or visit the link (although the percentage will probably be higher than for today's Windows users). The virus propagates itself by going out to every person in the address book. (Accessing the user's address book doesn't require root privileges, AFAIK
Anyhow, now the tricky part arrives: how many of people in the average Mac user's address book are themselves Mac users? If (as I suspect) the average is close to the usual 2-3% then the virus fails to reach critical mass (How many people do you have in your address book? I have a few dozen at most). If, on the other hand, Mac users have a high proportion (40%?) of mac using friends, then you might be in luck.
I can think of a way or two around this, but the difficulty lies in dealing with the small % of mac users rather than in trying to find a flaw in the OS.