Posted on 08/12/2008 6:01:43 AM PDT by BRK
Apple has taken the place of Microsoft for disclosing more vulnerabilities than any other vendor, according to an IBM security report. The company rose from second place in 2007 to take the top spot away from Microsoft, which had fallen into third place behind open source content management system Joomla.
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
Microsoft folks celebrate away and post your joy here. Apple fans flame away all you want, nothing can ruin this wonderful, long time coming day for me. I feel like I am walking on the Clouds portrayed on the Windows 95 Desktop. Apple will be busy over the next few weeks cutting all thier gloating about security from all thier marketing material. There won't be anything left after the trimming except Time Machine ( oooooooOOOooo ) and the admittedly coolest hardware in the world. How about replacing it with a new slogan like "When it comes to security, we are almost as good as Joomla." I can almost visualize that Apple TV ad guy saying that with his calm demeanor. O happy day!
There are just as many viruses attacking Mac as PC.
I have both. At home, I like my Mac, but like PC, it can be frustrating.
I don’t agree that Mac is better necessarily. It’s just a different tool. It has a lot of fun applications. But when you are going from one website to another, chances are pretty good that if you have PC, you won’t have as many issues with incompatibility with the site.
I’ll give you about 5 minutes before you’re overwhelmed by Linux guys...
(Yea, I hate those annoying Apple ads, too.)
One word in favor of PC: GAMES!
Tech PING!
I also have a super cool MacBook running Vista. Best, fastest laptop I have ever had. 2 years old and I have been to Afghanistan twice with it. Guess what? Not a scratch on it anywhere and only a couple of small “springs” in some of the thim metal around the corners and Superdrive openings. Apple has the hardware down cold. Didn’t mean to detract from that fact in my post of this glorious article. My target is droning obnoxious MAC/Steve Jobs groupies. Now they can all FINALLY just shut the heck up can’t they?
Glad this news sends a breeze up your skirt.
After 20+ years in the computing industry, and over a decade of having to put up with the fecal matter Microsoft ships as software, I decided to switch to the Mac.
I now waste much less time on security issues than I used to. I certainly waste none on rebuilding my system from scratch, as I used to. Apple’s hardware and OS offers me an environment where I can run both Windows and Linux/FreeBSD if I want (and I do) as guests under OS X. The net result is a more stable Windows environment.
And FWIW - I run Windows as a guest under OS X every single day the stock market is open. The reason I now run Windows as a guest OS under OS X is that I have money riding on the issue. Downtime used to cost me dearly to play rebuild-the-system games under Windows.
The Linux mob is perhaps one of the most annoying trends/fashions out there in the computing industry. They’re motivated more on most days by their hatred of Microsoft and less by technical excellence.
In Unix implementations, I highly prefer FreeBSD for this reason. You don’t see too many BSD fanatics spinning their wheels hating MSFT. They just roll code.
When I last worked in Silly Valley, there was an effort to use Linux as a basis for a product. I warned management that the Linux mob was motivated much more by left-wing anti-property ideals than technical excellence. I said (repeatedly) that the BSD licensing was far more in keeping with our goals as a company - to make money and NOT give our work away.
The young, unwashed and smelly Linux mob convinced management otherwise. Management always gets sucked in when they have a bunch of enthusiastic young twerps peddling something that is “free.” The old fart over in the corner gets dismissed as old and out of touch.
Management realized a couple years after I left that there were, indeed, trap doors in the Linux GPL. Turns out that the cranky old fart in the corner actually knew something about the favorite s/w of the twerps after all. Too late.
The marxist cant of the GPL crowd is what really annoys me about the Linux mob.
Isn’t switching to MAC right now a little like moving the San Francisco during an earthquake? Perhaps risky? After all, according to this report, it has the HIGHEST number of reported security vulnerabilities of ANY vendor. WooooHoooo!!!
The GPL requires payment. The BSD does not. The payment is in a non-monetary form, but it is still a form of payment. That's all it is.
ROFLMAO!!!
Wisdom and experience are no match for ignorance and exuberance !
Well, no.
Many of the bugs that Apple is fixing (and are being found on Macs) are inherited from the “free” software that Apple is using as the basis for much of the OS X environment. There is a huge body of “free” (as in beer) s/w that has been incorporated into OS X - just pull open a term window and start playing Unix hacker. All of that stuff isn’t really Apple s/w - it is a lot of open source/free s/w ported to OS X. As such, Apple inherits the problems of that s/w. Since there are more OS X system running out there than there are Linux/*BSD boxes, the long-standing bugs in much of this s/w are now being found and patched as a result of being “productized” by Apple.
The architecture of OS X (and the lack of something so easily corrupted as Windows’ Registry) means that security problems on the Mac are far less systemic than on Windows. The lack of “active content” reduces the means by which attacks can manipulate the system from any application.
Windows’ architecture means that even layered applications’ exploits become a big problem for the whole of the machine.
To me, the proof of the pudding is this:
I’ve not seen any zero-day exploit in the wild on OS X that didn’t require me to surf on over to a web site with the exploit. There have been no worms that have just punch in via a port. There have been no emailed viruses/sploits that could use active content to infect my machine.
I’m running OS X without any security s/w installed. I’m running around naked, with my naughty bits flopping in the breeze, so to speak... and loving it.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t find some of Apple’s ads annoying and snooty. I do. I used to work on Mac’s from ‘86 to ‘94. I hated the preening, smug attitude of Mac zealots. I was the “downer” in the group of Mac pro’s with whom I hung out - because I was focused on engineering excellence and in the old Mac OS, there were some moby freakin’ hacks that defied excuse.
OS X, however, has the goods. Sure, they’re still patching. But from an architectural standpoint, I think OS X is superior to Windows from NT through Vista. Windows 7 might change my mind, since from all reports I’ve seen, MSFT is going to be aping OS X in Win7.
Making money.
From the standpoint of a public-traded corporation, the GPL has nothing but liabilities.
The BSD license limits those liabilities.
What’s the name of the dude that shills for Apple on this forum? Swordmaker? Would love to hear from him or her.
You really should get out more.
But thanks for posting. This lets me know I shouldn’t bother buying an Apple.
As I said--it depends on the purpose of the software. If you're gonna sell your product and that product uses GPL software, then yes--it would be a liability. BSD would be a better choice.
If, however, you are using it in-house, and would like "free" development, and think the software would be useful to others, then the GPL would be good, because any development that others do would get back to you.
Again--it depends on the situation.
Quantity != Severity
Get back to me when a self-replicating virus actually exists for OS X.
Two years ago I bought an Apple I-Pod with a two year warranty, the thing quickly proved itself to be a piece of cr*p. Hard drive always crashing. I sent the thing to Apple, they sent it back, “Nothing Wrong”. The I-Pod continued to work for a while and then crash, now it has finally crashed and burned for good. Good riddance, to Apple products.
Your post is somewhat thoughtful, so thus far, not a single post from a true Apple zealot has been made. I guess they are indeed under a rock. I know I would be.
Well, in the case of “free development” we had some downsides from that as well.
Many of the GPL/OSF developers “in the wild” have no idea what it means to work “in the large” — ie, on millions of lines of code, with thousands of engineers.
We’d put changes into some of the development s/w we used and kick the changes out. Our changes had very definite purposes - supporting development “in the large.”
The “free development” we got in return was all too often our changes pulled out, or modified to a point where they were useless - because the ideologically pure developers on the outside knew oh-so-much better than us what was going on.
After awhile, we decided that we’d opt out of the “free” software movement and just contract with Cygnus to do our changes to tools and let them deal with the GPL/FSF/OSF mobs. We had contracts that feature X would be supported. We no longer cared how that happened - just that it did.
The next problem down my list of issues with the GPL/FSF crowd is this: while they’re often very talented in isolation, they most often don’t get along well with others, if at all. This is why there are so many forks in the Linux/GPL “movement” - these guys have the social graces of a barrel full of constipated and pissed-off badgers. They’re all so rigidly attached to their ideologies that they’re going to take their ideas and fork off from the group, which just distracts from a core mission.
Well, in the corporate world, almost nothing big and profitable is accomplished by lone wolves any more, and this is why much of their output is increasingly of little use.
In the BSD world, there isn’t the same tendency to playing the “screw you guys, I’m going home” games. FreeBSD, rather than have a mob of the masses and two high priests at the top, has a meritocracy where the work is spread out along functional lines, and those senior people in their particular functional area are gatekeepers. People have to get along more/better in the BSD model.
And it shows in the end result.
I’m not saying that nothing useful comes out of Linux - they certainly do some important and useful work, but in my experience, the Linux/GPL movement has created some big downsides for themselves.
Honestly, it’s not that Apple never had security issues, it’s that Apple never had the market share to make hacking or developing a virus for it worth it.
Now that Apple has increased it’s market share, hackers and the virus developers now have a reason to exploit the vulnerabilities that are inherent in any OS platform.
People have to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly secure OS, you can secure any OS and make it completely unhackable, but that renders it’s almost useless for normal use.
Just look at the military’s definition of a completely secure computer, no mouse, keyboard, monitor, or network connection, that’s the only way they you can make any computer no matter what the OS secure.
So to all Apple computer users, welcome to the real world of greater market share and all it’s foibles.
I just replaced my white MacBook for.................... a black MacBook! Life is good! :-)
Mac may be a marginally better product. But the price difference is anything but “marginal”. Overpriced piece of junk that you could build for 15% of the cost at home using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or Linux “yes i said linux!”.
The PC is still the best platform out there per $. This MAC craze simply exists because of the Ipod.
"Microsoft held on to the top spot for the number of public exploits"
Vulnerabilities are theoretical, as in "If someone did this and this and had access to this and a user clicked this and then this, then someone could possibly compromise the machine."
Exploits are out there hurting people, right now.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
You are probably right. This is what I was told by a former tech who was a colleague and was responsible for Windows Infrastructure, but who also supported PC and Mac on the WAN. He also had Mac at home.
BTW he was the go to person in dealing with viruses.
There are? Name them. Proof-of-concept laboratory wonders do not count. They have to be in the wild.
I can think of about three trojans... not self replicating, self transmitting viruses. No spyware.
And your own life is improved how, exactly? Hoping for the destruction of others is a form of envy; the same kind of envy exploited by Dems when they yammer on about soaking the rich.
My husband bought me a MacBook for moms day and I could not be happier. I think it is a matter of personal taste and for me this is the best machine I have ever used.
Ummmm... gloat away. Name ONE vulnerability that has cause a single issue in the “wild”... just one. Go ahead... I am waiting...
(crickets chirping.....)
The difference now is that Apple is staying ahead of the vulnerability game. While Windows users actually start getting attacked via vulnerabilities, Apple releases info on them after they have been patched.
Also - not how many MS vulnerabilities are open in standard operation, and compare that to the supposed Apple vulnerabilities, which far more often than not, that are generally confined to features or settings that are not active by default.
Further - I challenge you - remove ALL antivirus protection from your Windows PC. Allow unfettered access to the internet. My PowerMac is on a high-speed connection 24-7 with ZERO antivirus software and zero other extra efforts to “protect” it. I am so disappointed that nothing bad has happened to my machine.
So - go ahead and gloat. That’s fine. But when you can come up with a single vulnerability that could have ANY affect on my machine - give it a whirl - send it my way....
Hmmm... for high-end users, comparable hardware is significantly LESS expensive to go with Apple (Mac Pro).
From the consumer side of things, there is a price differential - but Apple hardware IS better for a variety of reasons. Notice that several NON-Apple publications have shown that Windows actually runs BETTER and FASTER on Apple hardware. Why? Apple doesn’t do the typical “buy what is cheapest” and throw it together. Apple picks and chooses, then develops specifically for that collection of components.
As I said, this I had from a tech who had the responsibility for the Windows infrastructure and had to support both PC and Mac and that he had Mac at home.
I double checked, because I was pretty sure that I neither said nor inferred that I was gloating.
Nor did I infer that I thought that Mac was inferior. I openly stated that I use Mac at home. I happen to use PC at work. Each has different applications and functions that it has to offer.
For Later Reference.
BattMan was refering to my gloating and I am still doing it. GLOAT GLOAT GLOAT. We have a few MAC types crawling out into the light and making all these lame excuses about “viruses in the wild” and “thoeretical blah blah blah”. Bottom line is that NUMBER ONE is still NUMBER ONE. And who is NUMER ONE in reported security vulneribilities? APPLE! All Apple all by itself in the number one spot. Spin it all you want, but these are the facts.
Not disclosing vulnerabilities doesn’t mean you don’t have them.
Say what?
OIC, so this is actually a good thing? Is that why the headline of the story says “APPLE bruised...?”. This simple pun illustrates perfectly what you are failing to grasp. This is a bad thing. NUMBER ONE in reported security vulnerabilities. Not just more than Micrsoft, but TWO full positions above it! How can this possibly be good under any conditions? HA HA HA...
I am not avocating anyone's destruction. I am just happy to see a plate full of crow being feed to the MAC crowd at long last. They so deserve it after all their years of bashing all the non-Apple things in the world. Apple is a fine company and probably won't be destroyed by being NUMBER ONE in reported security vulnerabilities.(Two notches ABOVE Microsoft by the way.)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Apple fans flame away all you want, nothing can ruin this wonderful, long time coming day for me. I feel like I am walking on the Clouds portrayed on the Windows 95 Desktop.
Um, if this brings that much joy to your life, go with it. Meanwhile, as Apple is disclosing security vulnerabilities, Windows viruses outnumber those for OS X by about 60,000 to zero.
Are you kidding? That's like saying there are as many people at the Superbowl as there are on the moon.
Everyone is forgetting what is truly important!
Like I mentioned right off the bat... GAMES!
Consoles can’t compete with a P.C.
Apple can’t compete with either of them.
Yea, my vic-20 is virus-free, too.
And starts up in seconds!
So what?
Apple: Vulnerabilities reported and patched.
Microsoft: Vulnerabilities exploited in the wild, used in attacks on machines that cost billions of dollars in downtime, hijacked machines and networks, IT labor, and lost data.
Is this a distinction you’re having a hard time understanding?
Shouldn't you be in school?
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
Offended Mac-user, I assume?
“All play and no work puts ReignOfError’s panties in a bunch...”
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