Re: OT: Update Virus Checker

Daniel-San wrote: 
"rw" wrote in message ...

In general, OS X is intrinsically FAR more secure than Windows, which IMO is a massive kludge of an OS, full of dangerous flaws due to backward compatibility constraints and just plain poor design. 


Truly curious here, why?

The biggest reason is simply numbers. The crackers that have no life and get their jollies from writing the viruses, trojans, etc. that exploit flaws in computer code want to do damage to as many computers as they can so the pick on the most common--Microsoft operating systems and applications.

Also, by design, many other operating systems like Unix, Linux and OS X are less prone to damage from attacks. For example, the laptop that I am writing this on is running Suse Linux. Linux has two main levels of login. "Root" is the highest level. Only "root" can make changes to the operating system that can affect the way the the system runs. As long as I am not logged in as "root," even if I were to open some email attachment that contained some Linux attack it could do no damage to the operating system because my normal user login does not have permission to make changes. I hope that is at least as clear as mud.



There are NO known viruses to which OS X is vulnerable. One may appear some day, but it hasn't yet, and if it ever does we're sure to hear about it. OS X users don't even need anti-virus software. The record speaks for itself.



I don't remember where, but I know I read someone arguing that the reason for this is two fold: one part being that there just isn't the 'market', that the idiots who write these things wouldn't get whatever satisfaction they do get because there would be a small population affected; 

True - see above.

and two, that for some reason, these idiots have some sort of twisted affection/adoration for Macs, and targeting Gates' products gives then some weird pleasure.

I don't think many have a particular affection for Apple products, but many have great hatred for Bill Gates and Microsoft and for many good reasons.

I am convinced that the two best things that Windows users can do for themselves to help stave off problems is to: One, stop using Internet Explored as a web browser and two, stop using Outlook Express as an email client. Those two applications just seem to be big open doors for whatever is out there trying to get into your computer.

It is very difficult to completely remove Internet Explorer from your computer and you probably don't want to anyway. I keep it around because once in awhile you will run into a web site that will only work correctly in IE. I always try to send the web master of such site a friendly note that I won't be back if I can't open his site in Firefox.

Just my $.02 worth,

Russell
.

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