inPhase, I respectfully suggest you do not know what you are talking about.
What does Tivoli Storage Manager (a remote storage backup system) have to do with unwanted installation of "spyware"? Spector is merely a method of checking on employee and family member computer activity on YOUR computer for YOUR purposes. Not the same thing at all.
Spector has this to say about their product... which is not spyware in the now accepted usage of the term:
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SPECTOR
The only Spy Software for Mac OS 9!
Install Spector on your Mac running OS 9 and it will record EVERYTHING your spouse, kids and employees do on the Internet.
Spector AUTOMATICALLY takes hundreds of screen snapshots every hour, very much like a surveillance camera. With Spector, you will be able to see EVERY chat conversation, EVERY instant message, EVERY e-mail, EVERY web site visited and EVERY keystroke typed.
Unlike other e-mail recording software, Spector also records HotMail, Yahoo Mail, and other anonymous email accounts via snapshots.
Watching the recorded activity with Spector is like using a VCR. Just press "Play".
Spector is 100 percent compatible with all versions of AOL and AOL Instant Messenger.
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Neither of these applications meets the now accepted usage of "spyware." "Spyware" are applications surreptitiously installed on your computer for the purposes of monitoring your computer usage for the benefit of some third party, not a monitoring program YOU intentionally install to check the usage other users are making of your computer. Nor is "spyware" a program designed to archive your data to a remote location for safekeeping which you determine and initiate.
Your original post implied that Apple was installing spyware on YOUR computer without your knowledge... I pointed out this was impossible without your permitting it to happen. Unlike MicroSoft Windows, Macintosh OS X REQUIRES Administrator level permission to install any software and even higher level permission to alter and add to the core System software.
Note also that Spector is for Macintosh OS8.0 - 9.2 and NOT for OS X. Perhaps you might have gotten a clue from that? It is not available for OS X because on OS X it is impossible for one user, even an Admin level user, to see the files and actions of another user, or even to access their directories. Such access require ROOT level access, which can only be activated AT THE COMPUTER.
You stated "facts" that actually perpetuate a myth about the fallibility and penetrability of UNIX based systems and Mac OS X:
It is not true that Unix or Macs with r w rr priviliges are inpenetrable. If you are even connected to a printer (a simple network) there are ways to break in. It's just that there are so few macs, it is not as much fun for the hackers.
Strange, your opinion does not seem to match the opinion of people who are experts in UNIX and in Macintosh OS X, which at core is BSD UNIX. Burt Janz, a senior software engineer who is president and owner of CCS New England, a computer-services provider in Nashua, N.H., who has developed software on all the major operating systems -- Windows, Unix, IBM Corp.'s OS/2, as well as OS X -- says "While creating a Mac OS X virus is not impossible, the degree of difficulty here is at least 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10."
And, unlike the Mac OS, a user account with administrative privileges on a Windows machine can wreak catastrophic damage to data, programs -- or the system itself.
"Any misbehaving task under Windows is capable of modifying any [non-running program] anywhere on the system," Janz said. "And, when that [executable] file is run, bad things will absolutely happen."
UNIX is not just some minority OS, inPhase, it is a major player on main frames, servers, and other industrial strength requirements where security is absolutely imperative.
"Many orders of magnitude more people look over the source code for OS X and the related BSDs than have access to Windows source code," said John Klos, a developer of NetBSD, a flavor of Unix closely related to OS X.
Thus, many of the obvious holes in OS X were closed years ago.
So I again ask, "What spyware is that, inphase?"