I thought I was the only one who did that. Drats!
Or you can get raw with these strings. Either way, the violin is sweet yet lethal.
Do it!
Posted on 06/27/2011 10:21:23 PM PDT by Gomez
Microsoft is telling Windows users that they'll have to reinstall the operating system if they get infected with a new rootkit that hides in the machine's boot sector.
A new variant of a Trojan Microsoft calls "Popureb" digs so deeply into the system that the only way to eradicate it is to return Windows to its out-of-the-box configuration, Chun Feng, an engineer with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC), said last week on the group's blog.
"If your system does get infected with Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E, we advise you to fix the MBR and then use a recovery CD to restore your system to a pre-infected state," said Feng.
A recovery disc returns Windows to its factory settings.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
But on OSX there’s already malware that installs WITHOUT the user’s password.
The biggest OS will always be the biggest target. Fact: Apple recoomends 3rd party AV software. Question: Why?
Fact: OSX was the first to fall 3 years in a row where all things are equal in a hacking competition. Question: Why?
Fact: Windows XP is still used more than OSX and it’s 10 years old.
I thought I was the only one who did that. Drats!
Or you can get raw with these strings. Either way, the violin is sweet yet lethal.
Do it!
“I’ve been forced to suffer through the MS-windows one size fits all shoehorn over the years, and must say that it really just doesn’t suit me in any way, not to mention all the crap that people have to do to keep it from becoming a random spam generator for some Russian mobster. “
I understand that. On the forced to at work that’s mostly due to 3rd party vendors and the Russians, well usually employee’s doing something they shouldn’t. I’m only saying that the expense of Mac isn’t justified to me. When I say expense I mean the hardware and 3rd party stuff due to licencing fees, mostly hardware. There is a unix os under that mac and its ok. What would the expense be for your employer to switch to all Macs? Alot more than Linux, an os with most of the Mac os benefits and many of its own. I handled the IT crap at a junkyard. A very big and expensive junkyard with all 5 year old or newer vehicles that was extremely IT oriented. In the end its still a junkyard and porn sites drove me nuts with the viruses but it wasn’t the end of the world. The only hard one to get rid of is the one we haven’t seen yet and we only see it once. Mac’s are very uncomon in most work places simply due to expense, lack of upgrades available and lack of third party software. They are uncomon in the home because of expense and performance lags behind PC’s. These two things are really my only point. When Apple says its ok to put its OS on my home built PC’s I’ll take it seriously, not a chance before that happens.
*Another note on viruses, they are out there for Macs. Macs get hacked alot too. I understand a compromised Mac is harder to fix due to its nature. If anyone has a comment on that besides more mines better than yours I’d truly like to know.
How can you create another user or even reboot in safe mode if you can’t even get the darn thing to shut down and it ignores all commands from the keyboard or touchpad? This happened to my young son’s computer last fall.
No virus can control the shut-off button. Just hold all the way in for a moment - If Win can respond, it will attempt a stately shutdown. If it doesn't, then hold the button in until power leaves (it will certainly shut down).
Equally true: No virus can control the keyboard or mouse in the bios phase of startup. Press F8 at 1 second intervals till the safe mode screen is attained.
If you cannot get to Safe Mode, then your only alternative is a boot disk.
It seems to me that we should be able to file suit against the benefactors of the root kit who paid to advertise their goods on OUR machines without our permission! Sue those who advertise through the authors of the root kit malware! Hit them at the source of their income for treble damages for the time lost, data lost, and productivity lost in being forced to watch, locate removal tools, and removing their ads from our computers! It won't take too many successful tort cases before the advertisers get the message!
I was thinking along similar lines, starting from the idea that these operators seem to run free. I wondered why there isn’t a law enforcement presence which investigates these attacks and pursues the perpetrators. Maybe there is at some level, but it just doesn’t seem that they have much to fear. All the emphasis is on how to thwart these attacks, as though they were an ineluctable fact of life on the web.
I will again tell you there are no viable OSX viruses. None. There are, however, viable Trojans for OSX... about 22 in five distinct categories, at last count, all of which OSX will warn the user about if he attempts to download, install, or run one. There have been seven proof-of-concept virus candidates in the past ten years that have never been seen outside of a security company lab, all of which failed miserably to infect a single Mac when put to the test. So, for-q-clinton, it simply is not "garbage." Until you can demonstrate a Mac, in the wild, infected with a true computer virus, it has not happened—making your post FUD!
You've been told why before, repeatedly, for-q-clinton. Yet you keep raising the SAME Strawman, even though it's been answered numerous times.
Once again, here is the answer.
It's simple: the contestants were not competing simultaneously. Each competitor was given a half hour window for his attempt to break into the target computer of his choice, then the next competitor was given an opportunity to target his choice. The Mac was the choice target of all the contestants! That's why it was always first to fall.
No one scheduled himself to target the Linux machine first. And after the Mac was won, they went after 2nd best, the Windows machine. They all went first after the most desirable computer to win, the Mac. This is documented.
The first year, Charlie Miller, an ex-NSA computer security expert, got the first half-hour attack opportunity window in the draw and used a prepared exploit that took him (and his team of two other ex-NSA experts) three months to find and weaponize. Computers are fast and once the Referee navigated to the prepared website and downloaded Miller's file and executed it, he was in. It was a Trojan using a flaw in Safari and Java. Miller stated that his exploit depended more on the flaw in Java and that it would have worked on all three platforms... But he wanted the MacBook Pro.
The following year, the contest Judges changed the rules so the previous year's "champion" would "defend" his "title," so they GAVE Miller the first slot! Miller, using another flaw he had found the previous year and saved, not revealing it as the rules required, again won the Mac... Shutting out the other contestants. The next year, realizing the inherent unfairness of the "defense" approach, the judges returned to the lottery approach to assign slots. The first slot went to another hacker who also targeted a MacBook Air with a pre-set attack and won because "he wanted the Mac and wanted to tweak Apple"... with a Trojan attack through Java again. Miller got the second slot and won a Sony Vaio in a two second exploit. They reported that no one won the Linux machine... But from what I heard, no one prepared to go after it.
Sorry, you are wrong... On several levels. I've been a cross platform computer consultant for 28 years and I can assure you that most of what you've posted on Macs in this thread is just plain myth. You demonstrate you really know very little about Macs.
The only true viruses that have infected Macs were for Apple Mac OS 9 and under which ran Macs prior to 2001 before the introduction of OSX. . . for an OS that is totally unrelated to modern Macs except for being published by the same company. The two OSes, Apple MacOS 9 and under and Apple Mac OSX share no code, no architecture, or even theory of operation. They only superficially share a user interface.
Your claim that "Macs get hacked alot" is false to reality. Yes, there are a few well publicized Mac hack events... But they are well publicized BECAUSE it is news when it happens.
Macs are UNIX under the hood, an industrial strength OS that has undergone a 44 year open-source trial by fire, exposed to every attack vector many, many hackers could think of... And patched as they found weaknesses. Finding new avenues of attack is far from easy. The only successful new ones have been Trojans, social engineering of the user and just one that requires the user to be running as an administrator user that does not require an administrator password, in which case it WILL start the installer, but still requires the user to physically install it by clicking continue... Three times, ignoring warnings.
As for "compromised Macs being harder to fix?" You're joking, right? Most Mac users can handle most Mac problems themselves. There is no registry to get compromised or corrupted. A clean install of the OS can be done in 45 minutes or less without wiping the hard drive or losing any data. There is never any need to defrag or optimize the disk. Deleting a broken or compromised application is as easy as dragging it to the Trash Can and emptying the Trash (one DOES need administrator access to do that).
Incidentally, there is MORE software that will run on Macs than will run on your PCs. My Mac can run all Mac OSX software, all Windows software (two virtual machines, one Windows7, one WindowsXP), and one variety of Linux, as well as all UNIX software... all simultaneously. If I want, there are other virtual machines I can run on my Mac on demand for other OSes (and have) including MS-DOS, THEOS, C-64 software, Apple Mac OS9 software, Atari software, Amiga-OS, etc. These run within virtual windows under OSX... sandboxed.
As for your claim of speed, several reviews from recent Magazines have claimed that the fastest Windows PCs they have ever tested have been Macs.
Let's not forget Vista.
I have always used Windows except for one foray into Linux. Never have any real problems. I just upgraded my home box from XP to 7. I really like W7.
There you go again...spouting all kinds of crazy rules to qualify the lies.
And you been told before Swordmaker, that OSX has lost 4 years in a row at a hacking competition.
1st time the excuse was the hackers wanted to win the Mac computer so they chose it.
2nd year the excuse was the hackers still wanted to win the Mac computer so they chose it and it took an uber special hacker from NSA (or was it NASA) to pre-stage the hack. (I know this means that the hole was left exposed for the chicoms and ruskies to exploit while he waited to win the competition...but they aren’t as smart as this one guy from the NSA I guess).
3rd year. See 2nd year excuse.
4th year. Oh oh, a canadian team won it! Oh crap if the Canadians can do it anyone can. Uh, these competition don’t mean anything since it’s equal for all computers in the competition to attack...a big part of the OSX security is hiding out with a bunch of zebras (windows) and pray they don’t attack us.
Did you also claim there was no way to install malware on a Mac without providing the Admin password also? We all know how that turned out.
BTW: I’m not whining...I’m pointing out the lies I hear on the Mac threads. And the only reason I’m there is I got sick of the Macbots doing this crap to windows threads.
The Mac will do that, plus have all of your applications, data, accounts and settings back in place if you'd like - one click, walk away until it's done.
I can have a computer 10X better than a Mac for $300
That's funny. A $3,000 Mac is going to have at least a 2.8 GHz Xeon processor, which retails for $1,200. The highest-end iMac for $2,200 has a 3.4 GHz Core i7, which retails for $300. For $300 you are just going to have a CPU sitting on your desk, nothing else.
A lot of us are Windows users too. In fact, I have an entire Windows 2008-based network running on my Mac, and another 2003-based one I can crank up too.
Vista was an attempt to copy OS X 10.4. OS X left XP in the dust long ago. I actually use all three of the operating systems we're discussing. Now if Windows 7 had been out a few years ago I may not have switched to OS X 10.4. But that's Microsoft's problem, they've caught up to where Apple was a couple years ago.
So you’re admitting you’re a macbot? There’s a difference between a macbot and a mac user.
Macbots post FUD in windows threads (like the 1st repsonse to this thread or the several posts by Swordmaker).
Discussing Windows issues in a windows thread even though you use a Mac and windows doesn’t make you a macbot.
As for the costs of Macs, I think that's largely one of perception rather than reality. When you compare appples to apples (no pun intended), price-wise there is not really that much of a premium for Macs over a name-brand. We've seen that illustrated here with side-by-side comparisons more times than I can remember. I built my own desktop when I upgraded about a year ago primarily because I had very specific requirements in mind, and wanted to make sure I had a box that would last for 10 years like my previous desktop did. If it had been primarily intended for my wife or MIL, I would have gotten a Mac, because it would have worked just as good for about as long, and would have cost about the same in the end.
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