Re: New Patch Fixes 43 Flaws In OS X, Many Serious

"GreyCloud" <mist@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OeCdnU545MmD-vrZnZ2dnUVZ_u-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Daniel Johnson wrote:
This is, I think, a strong argument that Mac OS X *is not*
resistant to viruses or anything like that.

It isn't?? How could we tell?

Well, one way is to see what it's advocates have to
say about. OS X had technical measures to protect itself,
I would expect Mac advocates to tout them. But they
do not.

[snip- psychoanalysing MS]
It must be something exogenous to the product itself;
it may be the Mac's very low marketshare, or perhaps
some charactaristics of the users who use Macs.

Or the fact that Unix is just quite a bit more difficult to intrude upon
than Windows.

Is it? In what way?

It seems the wintrolls just can't get enough intestinal foritude to admit
to this simple fact that Windows isn't Unix and has problems with
security.

Mac OS X is not a Unix.

It is Unix compatible, but that's mostly bad from a security
point of view: you get to have things like setuid-root programs
and so on.

It is not like the implementation owes much to any Unix.

I would not lose much sleep over the design defects Mac OS X
has gotten for the sake of Unix-compatibility. I would be
concerned over the stuff Apple has done on their own.

Consider the dashboard debacle that occured at the launch of
Tiger (10.4). That revealed a astonishingly cavalier attitude towards
security. And to add to that, they didn't get the problem fixed
until 10.4.2! And *even now*, when the implementation is not so
buggy, it's still less secure than ActiveX.

[snip]


.

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