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To: ccmay

Bearing in mind that PC's are ubiquitous and will always be, I'm not sure how this post helps anything.

Furthermore, claiming that Apple is immune from the exact same sort of attack is nothing short of misplaced hubris.


11 posted on 02/10/2007 6:46:21 PM PST by Lazamataz (Global warming turns people gay.)
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To: Lazamataz
Good evening. I hope you are well.

My firewall gets probed from red China daily. I should have bought stock in Whois.

5.56mm

12 posted on 02/10/2007 6:51:53 PM PST by M Kehoe
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To: Lazamataz
Bearing in mind that PC's are ubiquitous and will always be, I'm not sure how this post helps anything.

IBM Selectric typewriters used to be ubiquitous too. Nothing lasts forever. Microsoft will fall from its current position sooner or later.

Furthermore, claiming that Apple is immune from the exact same sort of attack is nothing short of misplaced hubris.

The main reason that this is not so is due to Microsoft's poor implementation of Administrator privileges. There are many Windows programs that still don't run except in Administrator mode, and thus there are far too many grannies, kids, office drones, and other assorted lusers running Windows as administrators. This allows rooting of your PC box from a website or an e-mail attachment without any further intervention by the luser.

In OS X and other Unix systems, by contrast, the bright line dividing super-users and regular users has been well established for decades. There are no OS X application programs that require Administrator/super-user rights, and any mucking with the system requires explicit super-user validation. A malware payload of the type discussed here would bring up a dialog box requring the user to explicitly give a super-user's name and password before it could proceed.

-ccm

15 posted on 02/10/2007 8:55:07 PM PST by ccmay (Too much Law; not enough Order.)
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