Posted on 08/21/2005 5:35:07 PM PDT by bizzyblog
As a 20-year Macintosh user going back to when the machines didn't even have hard drives, I confess to being a big fan of Apple and the Mac OS.
I also confess to being a nearly-insufferable Mac evangelist (some would say "delete 'nearly'") until about seven years ago, when, as a result of Windows 98, the differences between Windows and the Mac as a platform for the average user became so small that they didn't matter. Those differences remain small, despite the exceptionally cool advances in the Mac OS through Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger.
(snip)
Also cooling my ardor for the Mac is the remarkable air of condescension still present in "the Mac community," which is pretty amazing considering Apple's puny market share. I believe that the attitudes of too many current Mac users prevent a lot of those who might consider ditching Windows from doing so, simply because they don't want to be seen as joining what has almost become a cult (some would say "delete 'almost'").
So, in the interest of knocking Mac users down a peg or two, I offer three reasons, based on news of the past week or so, that we in "the Mac community" should cool it on the arrogance. At the same time, I'll knock down three myths about the Mac and its users (bolds are mine in all three reasons).
REASON 1--Exploding the myth that Mac users are so much more civilized than the rabble who use PCs:
Seventeen injured during used laptop sale
(Excerpt) Read more at bizzyblog.com ...
Did you not see my repost? I can't help it that FR runs Linux and it's preview doesn't work correctly. I do what I can with the tools I'm given. However, I quickly work-around the Freerepublic bug and posted it in HTML. Is that good enough for you?
Why? There are already better 70,000 viruses for Windows vs. ZERO for the Mac. It is you who claim it would be easy. My duplicating what thousands of others have already done proves nothing... your doing what thousands of others have not WOULD prove something.
How about we have a bet? I show you where a virus is possible and you leave Free Republic for 1 month?
Hmmmmm. Works for everyone else... just requires all HTML if you use even one HTML code anywhere in your text.
Good analogy. It applies aptly to me.
I love Macs and have had quite a few over the years.
I'm definately a non-technical person and cringe when I see people on here worrying about the latest virus. I can't imagine having to download and run all the different spyware and virus-detecting programs. Low maintenance is key for me. I've never had a problem in 10 plus years.
If this is the case then you should take my bet. I show you one exploit of Mac and then you leave for 1 month.
Once again you show your smugness...you speak as if you run FR and have spoke to every poster on here confirming that this feature works 100% of the time. But I guess that matches up with your zero viruses for Mac comment
Sophos' FUD article was laughed out of the industry in less than a week. Their announcement referred to OS9 and lower viruses... a completely unrelated operating system linked only in name. OSX has ZERO viruses. Sophos made their announcement at the same time as offering a Mac "anti-virus package" for sale that could only remove WINDOWS viruses and the 113 (including variations, the last of which appeared in 1997) known Mac Classic (OS1 throught OS9.2) viruses, and Microsoft Word Macro Viruses.
Sophos came up with a "proof of concept" trojan that required a user to operating in ROOT, something disabled in Mac OSX. It takes a specific intent to activate ROOT and then the user would have to install their trojan. Sophos' approach was rightly labled FUD and debunked soundly in the press and in the security industry. They were especially drubbed for implying that viruses for OS1-9 could somehow be imputed to affect OSX UNIX based computers.
It is not about a virus being "possible" it is about writing one that works and spreads. No one has accomplished that in five years. It really isn't about writing malicious code that will run on a Mac... the insurmountable problem is the vector: getting it to spread from one Mac to another without user intervention. That is why the very few malware that have been observed are Trojans that rely on psychology to spread, tricking users into installing and running them... and those few Trojans (two) impacted only a handful (literally) of Mac users.
My apologies if I damaged your passive-aggressive sensibilities. I may have been wrong. What did you mean by "Note to N3WBI3...see this is the type of person I was referring to in our first posts to each other."? I probably screwed up again. I thought you were being smug, condescending and insulting to one of my FR friends. I tried to find the post where you meant that "this kind of person" was a sweet, intelligent, and a damn good system administrator, but can't find any reference to your meaning.
doh... racing = embracing.
Show all of us "Smug, condescending, arrogant" Mac users a OSX virus, in the wild that is self-propagating, and self-replicating that has infected any Mac computer.
According to MacDailyNews as of August 10, 2005:
There are zero Mac OS X viruses. Excluding Microsoft Word and Excel Macro Viruses, there were about 25 viruses total that affected the original or "classic" Mac OS. Apple CEO Steve Jobs held an "funeral" on May 6, 2002 for the classic Mac OS, as the operating system reached its "end of life." Windows, at last count, had 97,467 viruses vs. 0 for Apple's Mac OS X. What viruses did respondents to Consumer Reports' survey find exactly? A Microsoft Word Macro virus on a dusty floppy diskette from 1989 that was designed to infect System 6? Or were the Mac users simply detecting Windows viruses and spyware that would be harmless to their Macs? There are zero viruses for Apple computers running Mac OS X.
TRUSECURE States on April 6. 2005 in an article debunking anti-Mac FUD:
The past several days have seen a rash of technology press stories regarding Mac OS X ("ten") malicious code (malcode) and hacking. The stories originated with a security vendor's threat report that mentioned a number of vulnerabilities in the OS as well as the potential of increased malcode development as OS X's adoption rate increases.Despite the low threat rate of OS X vulnerabilities and the non-existence of OS X malcode in the wild, many of the press took this as an opportunity to write misleading stories about the "problem" of Mac OS X malcode. . . .
. . . While no OS X viruses have been found in the wild, rootkits and trojans have been developed that could be utilized to compromise a system; however, owner assistance (or physical access to the system) is necessary for those attacks to be successful.
Silicon.com, in a June 3, 2005, article quoted a Sophos computer security and virus expert (apparently, the spanking Sophos received from the industry in late 2004 worked!), in response to a FUD spreader that OSX virus were just as feasible as Windows viruses. The article stated:
. . . . However, Sophos's Phil Wood isn't so sure. While he admits there could be a risk to Mac users from malicious code, the actual task of writing a virus that would penetrate and damage the operating system is probably beyond the technical abilities of the average malware author.He says: "The technical challenges of producing malware for the OS X operating system are more difficult than for Windows. Both Mac OS X and Linux are much more secure than Windows.
"You would have to be genuinely clever to write an OS X virus and most virus writers are not," he adds.
Princeton University, in an overview of UNIX systems updated in March 2005 said of Mac OSX.3 Panther:
There is still, at this writing, no virus that infects OS X. But virus-infected documents and e-mail attachments can be transmitted through OS X to Windows computers.
So, For-q, it is not just my "zero viruses for Mac comment" but documented fact...
Let's let someone else answer this who seems to know what he is talking about:
Although few viruses have been written for the Mac platform, Mac OS is inherently more secure than Win32 OS. With the advent of OS X, the stability and security of the fledgling platform were increased by a huge margin. The stability of UNIX (OS X uses the Darwin kernel) is unrefuted and has been since its inception.
The simple fact is that Mac OS was written to be more secure. UNIX (and all derivative *NIX systems) are very secure because they fulfill the needs of a powerful multiuser multitasking platform. When UNIX was developed, many users would hook up to a mainframe with dumb terminals, and if the machine went down, those users were screwed. Windows was developed solely for desktop users.
If you remember, Mac OS They still, however, have many problems with their (Microsoft) code. General philosophy with UNIX code is to keep it shorter, with many different functions used together to accomplish a goal. A UNIX application may use many different smaller applications to finish its task. Mac OS X, being a derivative of UNIX, inherently has this stability.
Win32, however, does not use this type of development. It uses DLLs (an inherent flaw of Win32; problems such as DLL hell or problems with viruses deleting them). Win32 also has terrible resource management, a keystone and cornerstone of any stable operating system. When there is a problem with the explorer.exe application, the application in charge of the taskbar and the system windows, it takes a long time to bring it back up.
Also, if you are running a virus and wish to end the derelict program, often times Windows has a restriction that will not allow you to close it. You have to boot it up in "safe mode" which is not easy. By that time, the virus could have wiped out many different important files.
If you look at Mac OS the management of resources is much better. Even with slower processors (notice apple processors don't go above around 2.8 GHz), such as 733 MHz, and smaller RAM (128 MB to 256 MB) OS X 10.4 Tiger can run like a well oiled machine, something Win32 cannot claim at all.
To run a Win32 machine with any hope of completing tasks, you must have at least 256 MB of RAM, although 128 is about the minimum possible. I have 1 GB of RAM in my machine, and sometimes Windows runs utterly slowly. Linux on the same hardware is much faster. Windows is just not terribly stable, more like the "house of cards" operating system. It doesn't support multiusers or multitasking terribly well (although with NT, multitasking was improved enormously).
Well I scanned your posts, but still haven't seen where you accepted my bet. If I show you a virus on Mac OS X you'll leave for 1 month. Your silence to this challenge speaks volumes.
Not when it comes to network access and sharing information. Early on, when Microsoft finally embraced the Internet after the failure of MSN as a proprietary network that Microsoft could control, there was talk from various people about removing the walls between the desktop and the Internet to make it easier to share information. I always made an analogy about how much easier it would be to walk into my house if I removed the front door but that door is there for a reason. As someone very familiar with the Internet and somewhat aquainted with the sort of hacking already going on with Unix servers at that point, I knew how foolish this was.
Simply put, it looked very much like Microsoft entered the wild Internet world with a trusted LAN or isolated computer mentality. You could see that in how they implemented various services and things like ActiveX controls. When given a choice between burdening the user with security or ease of use but insecure, it seemed like Microsoft chose ease of use but insecure almost every time, as if they just didn't understand security. Oh, I think they are getting their act together now but I think they are still paying the price for some very bad early decisions that grossly underestimated how dangerous networking can really be to security, particularly with the advent of broadband and always on connections.
Bear in mind that "easy" and "simple" almost always mean "insecure" in the real world. The best security is almost always a pain in the neck and difficult to use, whether it's periodically changing passwords or carrying around a SecureID card. Easy for the user almost always means easy for the hacker.
Basically, the Unix people largely learned their security lessons by the end of the 1980s, before Windows machines were even on the Internet in any large numbers. They fixed the problems where they could and we are still living with the weaknesses they couldn't fix without crippling things that people had come to depend on like email. It was clear to me, from Microsoft's press comments, that they didn't learn from most of the mistakes of Unix and went off and made their own mistakes and had to learn from them all over again. This put Microsoft at least a decade behind Unix in finding and fixing security problems. And just as we still live with insecurities in Unix-originated systems like email because fixing the problems would break the existing software that people rely on, Microsoft finds it difficult to fix problems in their own software that would break other features that people rely on.
What would YOU gain by my absence from Freerepublic for a month? Not that it would happen.
First of all, For-q, I have not said that a virus is impossible... I have said it is extremely difficult to write one... and secondly, that as of now there ARE NO VIRUSES that invade Macintosh OSX computers. I have then backed that up with authoritative sources.
YOU are the one making the claim that there are... against all documentation to the contrary... it is your claim that must be proved, not mine. I stand on the documentation... you stand on your uninformed opinion.
I have provided sources and documentatin backing up my assertion. You have just made irritating claims without proof or evidence. YOU need to provide documentation that your claim is correct. BETS are not required.
Hey, for-q. I said that I thought you were being smug, condescending and insulting to one of my FR friends. You owe an apology to Question_Assumptions at the very least and the rest of the Mac user's here for proving that smug and condescending is not exclusive to Mac users. Apologize for being smug and condescending or leave for one month, no, two, two months. Leave for two months and wear a ball cap that says, "I'm A Smug And Condescending SOB. Yeah, that's the ticket! Take the Smug and Condescending Challenge. Cone on, an apology or two months and a ball cap.
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