Re: Tampa Company switches to Macs

"Mitch" <mitch@xxxxxxxxx> stated in post 050820071902225502%mitch@xxxxxxxxx
on 8/5/07 10:02 PM:

In article <SQwti.1475$qa3.1103@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Joseph Crowe
<jcrowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You know, the real bottom line is that neither OS is totally
secure and I'd bet a lot of sheckels that no OS will ever be
totally secure. Back in the day I read an article that documented
the longest provably correct program at 1600 lines of code....a
trivial amount. OS design is much more complex and OSs in the past
were not ever designed with the security necessary to handle the
challenges thrown at them by the internet...this includes UNIX,
the SVR4 kernel of which I worked on for a number of years. This
back and forth about Windows vs. Mac security is a little
misleading. I don't know why Macs are not exploited as often as
Windows machines. I would point out to assume that Macs will remain
unexploited is naive. The point of the original guy who wrote the
article remains relevant....keeping a PC virus, spyware, trojan
and such is an expensive pain in the rear. Just saying that turning
on the firewall in XP SP2 and keeping up to date on Windows hotfixes
and security companies virus sigs will keep a Windows machine free
of problems is also naive. I read a recent article in which the most
effective of the Windows internet security suites found only 89% of
the stuff they threw at it in the test.....that's a pretty poor
margin of vulnerability. The way to keep PCs, including Macs,
secure is to keep them offline......

This is just a bizarre response.

You start talking about security in the absolute sense, when no one
brought it up.
Absolute security isn't the issue -- practical security is. Windows
frequently, horribly, and drastically suffers from MAJOR MAJOR problems
because of it's security issues. It causes users a LOT of concern, and
in most cases a very significant amount of time and learning.

With Mac OS, there is practically no risk, and it causes no time lost
to learning about problems, finding software to use against it, or
applying and updating that software. The OS itself is much safer and
much less at risk.

It doesn't matter why!

Now, WinVista is going to do much better. But it won't mean being able
to ignore any of those; it will only mean less damage and less frequent
problems caused.

Very well stated. One of the claims I hear repeatedly is that Mac OS X
users are only as safe as they are because of the relative obscurity of Mac
OS X. I wonder how many of those same people are the ones pointing out the
security concerns for the iPhone (though I do not think there have been any
actual instances of malware that hits the iPhone, either).


--
Teachers open the door but you must walk through it yourself.

.

Relevant Pages

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