Re: Apple Computer sides with Satan

David Nakamoto wrote:
> My experience with early Unix was that the computer was not that secure.
> It might have changed in the 10 years I've last worked on a Unix system,
> but that's what I remembered.

What--you mean in the 1970s? Yes. But at that time, there were zero
secure OS's by today's standards.

Just curious--what did you find insecure about any Unix in 1995 that
was not insecure about, say, Windows 95 or Mac System 7 (or whatever
was out at that time)? Which Unix were you using at the time?

There are some bad Unices. HP-UX is bad enough that I've heard it
called, at different times, Hockey-PUX and PH-UX (pronounced out loud).
What a pain that OS was to deal with. One thing that is significant
about OS's like HP-UX and AIX as opposed to Linux and FreeBSD is that
HP-UX and AIX are developed primarily at specific institutions. They
thus suffer from some of the same insularity issues that plague OS's
like Windows, especially pre-XP. It's noteworthy that the Microsoft
response to bug reports has, until recently, been rather lax. They've
improved, though.

> But they share some common design principles as well as some programs.
> Otherwise what's the point of calling them Unix or Unix-like? Yes,
> there are differences, but to paraphrase Dale Berra, "The similarities
> are different."

In security, the devil is in the details. The different Unices have
a common look and feel at the command line, but that's not where the
issue of how secure an OS lies. It is in fact possible to write an
OS that looks entirely like FreeBSD at the command line but is wholly
insecure.

In fact, many security bug fixes are not in the kernel itself but in
application clients and servers, most often to remove some buffer
overrun vulnerability. The fixed versions don't look different from
their predecessors in any way except that they don't yield a root
shell when you throw an exploit at them.

> As soon as "the Man" endorses OS X in a significant way, we're going
> to see more attention paid to it, according to both your reasoning
> and the way the world works.

When do you think Microsoft will actually endorse OS X? That is whom
I said attackers regard as The Man. I think you've totally misread
"my reasoning."

I think attackers will only revile and target Apple OS's as heavily
as they currently do Microsoft OS's if Apple begins to engage in what
are popularly perceived as underhanded business practices. It doesn't
matter at all if they really are underhanded--perception is what
matters.

Brian Tung <brian@xxxxxxx>
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