Re: XP vs Mac OS X

justin wrote: 
In article
<slrnd6ip5j.lk5.The-Central-Scrutinizer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, TCS
<The-Central-Scrutinizer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:41:36 -0700, Bob Monsen <rcsurname@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I recall a newspaper story last year regarding Mac OSX, which said their 'first virus' had arrived. I don't really know much more than this. I don't own an OSX box, so I don't really follow the news about it. 

Most people are reluctant to admit getting their technical facts from
newspaper stories.



Well, most people never used a Mac.


I have a graveyard of old macs stretching back to 1983, including a Mac 128k (upgraded to a 'fat mac', then to 4MB); a Mac IIx; a powerbook + dock; an iMac; and, a Clone. (I also have a Newton!).

As of today, here are NO virii or trojans in existence. And when the
email client is configured to pass plain ASCII only, which is as hard
as ticking a box, a Mac doesn't spread them either.


This isn't true, as my other posting suggests. There is a trojan rootkit designed to take over Mac OSX. It's been found on only one system 'in the wild'.

If there was one, rest assured it would hit the news big time.
Mac users are not spending any money on protection and as such, are
_very_ interesting to companies like Symantec which are dropping Mac
support.

As a Mac user since '90 I've never seen one, although I've heard of
some benign cases. I have been running OS X since it come out, as a
root, connected 24/7, with only a built in firewall. Never had a
problem.


I worked at Apple between 1987 and 1993. There were LOTS of mac viruses. I recall one that got into the QA lab in cupertino. The QA engineers kept writing bugs against our code that we couldn't reproduce. After going over to the lab, we determined they had a virus that had infected every machine in the lab, and that was interfering with the code.

Writing a virus for Mac OS 1-9 is incredibly easy to do, given the resource manager scheme. There were even hypercard viruses... Excel macro viruses... email worms... trojan horses...

I was present when a friend of mine was checking his email on a PC. It
took him 20 minutes to verify few messages, wait for all watchdogs to
bless the content, then update virus definitions... That was not fun.


Thankfully, it doesn't take this long anymore.

As for security and reliability, in '95 US Army switched its wintel
Apache servers to Macs running OS 9.


Well, that was a mistake. They should have been using something real, like UNIX, VMS, or even MVS. OS 9 has practically no security. Any process can whomp on any other process; the networking is wide open; the scheduler is cooperative, meaning any process can simply fail to give up control for arbitrary amounts of time; there is no file system protection. Even hardware is whackable by any process. Be all that you can be!

Regards,
 Bob Monsen
.

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