Apple Releases 31 Security Fixes 319
Agram writes, "This week Apple has released fixes for 31 vulnerabilities in its OS, although reportedly a number of known flaws remain un-addressed (according to the instigator of the Month of Kernel Bugs, 'Apple hasn't fixed any of the bugs published during [MoKB], except for the AirPort issue'). Earlier this year, in a move reminiscent of Microsoft's past patching faux pas, Apple released a 'fix' the installation of which broke features unrelated to the targeted flaw. With the growing number of low-level flaws, one has to wonder if Apple's 'more secure' argument still stands. Earlier this month, Microsoft released 6 fixes. Linux does not seem to fare much better. Despite all of these fixes, exploits remain in the wild for each platform. Perhaps, security-wise, the OS choice really boils down to a 'pick-your-poison X user-base' equation?"
Attacks Still Low (Score:2, Funny)
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A script kiddie can completely take over a critical windows server. It's far harder to get your code executed as admin or with admin priviliges on a linux,unix,or OSX machine.
THAT is the biggest reason. Unixes run far more of the internet than windows does, making it a prime target for someone who wants to cause trouble or steal information.
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument seems to be that OS X runs on loads of servers, which makes it a great target.. First off it doesn't run on loads of servers, it has no presence in the server market. Second the vulnerabilities are mostly all in WiFi drivers, PPPoE code, and Safari. Why would hackers going after servers be looking in client code?
Also you can only apply the fixes to 10.3 and 10.4. Never mind <10.3 users, they can pay $99 for security, and never mind if they have a machine which won't run 10.3, they can buy a new Mac. This is like MS charging for SP1.
If MS came out with a massive load of critical security fixes like this, which had all been around for ages and in use by hackers, they would be quite rightly ridiculed. When Apple comes out with this disgrace
I wish I was exaggerating but people really are posting these; it's bizarre the double standards some people on slashdot have.. We should at least like and dislike Apple and Microsoft for the right reasons, there are many reasons to prefer Apple but security just isn't one of them.
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Really? Have hackers been exploiting Mac vulnerabilities for months? Have any of these gone beyond proof-of-concept, if that?
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In that case "Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck." Which is a big leg up. No evidence of "hackers exploiting Mac vulnerabilities for months" in the real world.
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Er, no, his argument was that Unix runs on lots of servers, not OSX.
Wow, in that case I'm gonna have to cut down on the coffee because I'm having powerful hallucinations every time I walk into my server room...
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On to the ">10.3" section of your comments. Yes the security updates will not work on 10.2 or earlier. That is two complete versions ago. When is the last NT4 s
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple can develop great products, but they sure can't support them very long. Someone at apple needs to learn about maintaining software. Essentially you have to pay for security patches every two to three years. I end up running the latest OS release because safari and a few other things rarely see patches once its a version behind.
Before someone points out that apple is smaller than Microsoft, consider that smaller companies and groups maintain patches to their linux distros for far longer than Apple does with a commercial OS. I suppose some projects have worse policies... for instance FreeBSD EOL'd a bunch of stuff recently. I'm not in a position to back port patches when I get a few releases done with MidnightBSD yet since I don't have many developers. Apple does have developers.
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Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because buffer overflows are so much harder to exploit on non-Windows OSes, and it's so much harder to get someone to type "sudo make install" than to get them to do the equivalent on Windows.
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:4, Informative)
99% of all windows users run as admin. 100% of all windows server administrators log in with a admin level account and do lots of things as admin they they should not.
99% of the things malware wants to do, do not require elevated privileges.
NO APP NEEDS WRITE ACCESS TO THE C:/WINDOWS directory... NONE! yet the microsoft morons designed it that way because of the stupid registry.
Broken application that require write access to Windows system areas are 100% the fault of the app developer. It's got *nothing* to do with Microsoft.
No developer has had an excuse for releasing software that writes to places like C:\Windows for ca. 7 - 8 years.
Let's ignore the fact that most services under Unix lately do not run at the system level but under a protected user that does not have ADMIN access... but hey you were hoping that nobody noticed that.
Like modern Windows services do, you mean ?
Windows web server, buffer overflow = admin access. Linux web server, buffer overflow = user acces. Big different there. granted if you are silly and let apache user read the shadow passwords file your fault for not setting up security right.
IIS runs as its own user. A buffer overflow only nets you the privilege level of that user.
Why Windows security is terrible and OSX is better (Score:4, Interesting)
I. ActiveX. ActiveX is DESIGNED to give a web server full control over your machine. With Flash or Java, even if they're enabled a website can only do stuff if they also exploit a - very rare - flaw in your Virtual Machine. In ActiveX, if you let that control run it can basically do anything. They have some checks to try to block the probably-worst applets, but in the end it runs the code unprotected. Until ActiveX is limited to a VM, it should be totally disabled.
I'd personally guess that this alone accounts for more regular attacks than everything-else-put-together. Don't use ActiveX. And if you're not using ActiveX, there's little reason to use IE...
II. Administrator use is chronic. Basically nobody runs OSX in root or sudo-d mode. LOTS of people run Windows routinely in Administrator mode, for a few main reasons: 1) Lots of software only runs that way, and switching is a pain. NO user app should need to be root to run. 2) LOTS of software is very hard to install so a nonAdmin can use it properly, for starters because it only works on the account it was installed into.
I will completely admit that if all the ISVs behaved perfectly 1 & 2 wouldn't be a problem - but it is VERY plausible for Microsoft to exert enough control to make this better for the vast majority of users. Also, I don't believe all these ISVs do it just to be stupid - my guess is that the structure of Windows makes it MUCH easier to do it that way.
3) Lots of software that shouldn't even need admin privs to install does for no good reason. (I presume because of the way DLLs and the registry work they need to modify system folders even if they're only going to run as a local user - but that's definitely a Windows problem that it's structured that way.) And once you give those pieces of software admin privs, they can do anything - like installing themself as System so you can't kill them even WITH admin privs. All software should be installable with the MINIMUM possible privs. (Obviously system software or a virus checker needs admin privs.)
There are plenty of smaller reasons to be unhappy with Windows security, and I'm not trying to say I love their track record. I didn't address at all the fact that it comes out of the box extremely remote exploitable, (average of ~20 minutes for an unpatched box to be exploited on the internet - and several hours to download the patches!) But those are problems other OSes at least sometimes have and you can make reasonable comparisons. Until the two above are fixed, you shouldn't even COMPARE Windows desktop* security to OS X or Linux.
*Note that I said desktop. While there are some problems, neither of the above super-problems is a server problems. In fact, if you have to choose a server OS, you should probably choose based on what your admin is experienced in - better to have a well administered box than ANY badly admined box.
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Back in the dawn of the Internet, I was beating hackers out of my Linux boxes with a stick in the days when Sun, Microsoft, and IBM boxes outnumbered linux by an order of magnetude. Hackers go for soft targets with toys. Macs, with a full BSD system underneath, are just a juicy a target as anything else, and minted by the million would be taken 0wn3d given a smidgen of an oppertunity.
Change of the times (Score:3, Insightful)
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i'm not talking about things that infect servers or corporate/edu networks, bu
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Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, as we all know, don't trust statistics because 82.35% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if 50% of the people were running OS X, then no exploit could harm more than half the people at any given time. So in the long run, perversely, OS X is beneficial to the security of Windows.
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There is big money in hijacking windows boxes. You can pump spam through them or inundate them with advertisements through spyware. Considering that most users have Windows, there is more advertising money there. I think spammers and spyware people would rather have the number of windows users out there viewing their junk than the number of Apple users. However, expect that to change as Apple's marketshare grows.
Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:5, Informative)
If someone is standing on the corner going 'neener neener you can't hit me' someone out of spite regardless of any reward is going to do it. The fact that they've been touting they can't be hacked for several years now and they still haven't been hacked says to me that it's not easy to do/not able to be done as easily as it is on Windows.
Plus a lot of the 'security' problems don't focus on the exploits of IE and simple browsing hijacking your system with crap. That's the largest problem facing most IT departments that I've run across in the last year or two, not the OS itself being hacked but something stupid the browser does destroying the system.
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Re:Attacks Still Low (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. The attacker can simply use a privilege escalation exploit.
No OS... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Of course, the problem with GODOS is that you can't know if it's perfect until the computer is scrapped. In the Bitchy Beadle release of GODOS, the Schrödinger kernel is expected to improve the tracelogs.
There have been reports of computer users who claim to have briefly seen the perfection of GODOOS when their power supplies have developed an intermittent fault. Unfortunately for the proponents of GODOS, no one whose motherboard has been completely fried ha
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I don't think that most modern game consoles do either and they are computers with specified operating systems.
If you are depending soley on your choice of OS (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Run a firewall and only open what you need to be opened
2. Most importantly: DONT CLICK ON STUPID SHIT! Don't run seedy programs etc. It's amazed how many Windows users get infected like that
Those obviously won't protect against 100% of threats, but very few things in life are guarenteed.
Re:If you are depending soley on your choice of OS (Score:5, Insightful)
They shouldn't have to listen; the system should be designed for security from the ground up.
Relying on user education is #5 on the Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security [ranum.com].Re: (Score:2)
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It can also be a tool that others use against you.
"it is not supposed to do thinking for you"
Strange then that artificial intelligence research is almost as old as computing itself.
Re:If you are depending soley on your choice of OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost no regular user is thinking about the security implications of his or her computer use. Therefore, the OS designer should do it for them, to prevent damage to other users.
If they are sophisticated enough to think about security at every step, power users can disable or change security features manually.
A computer, to most people, is a tool to write stuff, communicate, and have fun. It's not, in their minds, a tool to promote security. So why not have the machine be as secure as possible automatically?
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If a user is dead set on running something then he is going to run it. There is little that can done to fix that. Implementing a TPM system where the user simply can't run unsigned binaries without flipping some switch is the only solution I can think of, and you can be sure most users will flip that switch as soon as whatever piece of malware they are attempting to install requests it.
The solution is to increase the granularity of control and the feedback from the OS. Right now you can run a piece of so
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A computer is a tool to let you do things, it is not supposed to do thinking for you.
A tool should be designed for a given skill level and environment so it works properly for most people. You wouldn't design a new blowtorch that superheats the air in lower latitudes and kills everyone when you turn it on. By default, it should behave reasonably and if some freak wants to mess with it, they can. That said, Windows in particular does a terrible job of doing what users expect it to safely. OS X does a bett
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Unfortunately it's not in OS X either, though it's long overdue.
We'll have to see what exactly is in OS X 10.5.
They should pay the author of Little Snitch and just incorporate it, but extend it to file access too (don't think it does that, if it did I'd buy it). Very easy to do, and the payoff would be huge for security against simple trojans and spyware.
Well, little snitch is sort of an add on for the firewall and not a good basis for ubiquitous system level security. Apple announced a month or two
Re:If you are depending soley on your choice of OS (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you honestly think people go Hrm, this program is pretty seedy, but I'm going to run it anyway! .
The real problem is people go Oh, I received an electronic fax, that's not a program and people like you just say No you dolt, that was an exe file, gawd how stupid are you!?
This is what I think the real problem is: Suggesting that people accept faulty software and their own failings.
Here's an idea: a big red button on the side of the computer. You hold it in, and executables can be created. Tell people that big red button lets other people change the way their computer works and no matter how the computer instructs them otherwise, to only push and hold that button in when they are unhappy about how their computer works and feel the need to change it.
That's what root is supposed to be for- whether they be called Administrator or sudo doesn't make it any more or less safe. The fact that Non-root can install software is a security weakness. The fact that the user can run as administrator and not know it is a security weakness.
My mother in law has been actively computing since 2002 without any viruses or "computer problems of any kind" simply because she has to call me in order to remount
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Unbelievable.... (Score:3, Insightful)
for security, you have already lost the battle. Staying(relatively) secure involves a few simple steps that most people still won't listen to:
1. Run a firewall and only open what you need to be opened
2. Most importantly: DONT CLICK ON STUPID SHIT! Don't run seedy programs etc. It's amazed how many Windows users get infected like that
Those obviously won't protect against 100% of threats, but very few things in life are guarenteed.
Emphisis is mine where I find it unbelievable people think that this is "advice". The way the modern computer operating system HMI works is "users click on things". Windows and MacOS are designed to present the user with an interface to click on things. What in the world kind of advice is it is to say "don't click on stuff!"??
Browsing files is normal operation. Browsing web pages is normal user activity. Looking at email is a normal user activity. Clicking on objects presented by the shell is a normal
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Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
your readers are all technically literate. Please don't post stories where dumb ideas like "how secure an operating system is = number of potential security holes fixed". That kind of stuff is for pointy haired bosses, not technically literate people.
Thanks!
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All...?!
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Dumb (Score:2)
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Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost everything relies on some form of user interaction, and yes, these things are still bad, especially ones that take advantage of some shortcoming in the OS. What's laughable about the submission is that it makes it look like it's "bad" that Apple fixed oh-so-many vulnerabilities, and then complains that it's not fixing enough. Apple does fix issues reported to them, period. And yes, we all have stories about this or that outstanding bug or vulnerability that is still open, but Apple has markedly, hugely improved, mostly because of listening to feedback from customers, particularly enterprise customers, in the security arena. It does have a way to go, and whether or not any fix is "fast enough" will always be subjective.
No one sane ever said Mac OS X was invulnerable. It has bugs and vulnerabilities like any OS. Apple responds to them. Someone will always think they're not responding fast enough, or correctly, or what have you, but the fact remains that Mac OS X has been on the market for over 5 years, and there has yet to be any substantial issue that has been exploited on any scale. And no, it's not exclusively because of marketshare.
Re:Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Effectively, for almost all desktop users in any environment, Mac OS X is much more secure, much less attacked, and much safer to use from a malware perspective, for almost all average users, period. Some of the reasons are due to marketshare, some are helped in part by marketshare, some are because of architectural decisions, and some are a mix of multiple reasons. But regardless of what someone "thinks", Mac OS X is still a manifestly safer OS for an "average user", and there is simply no disputing that.
If you want to get people to understand that even Mac OS X has bugs, great. (Duh?) If you simply want to make stupid people no longer stupid, that probably won't work. The average person doesn't care. All the average person knows, when they make the switch for example, is that their Windows box was packed with spyware and adware and then "got slow" and had multitudes of typical Windows problems that typical people have, and they don't have the same problems with their Mac.
Do Macs have problems and bugs and vulnerabilities? Yes. Will anyone win the pissing match of "which one is better" when it's not done for any reason other than to be a pissing match, like this article seems to be doing? No.
Well (Score:2)
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Is it possible for the Macintosh to have a major security flaw in the Apache Server?
If the Macintosh had a major security flaw in Apache, could there be a Code Red style of attack?
Would Apple release a patch to address the flaw in Apache, even though it's not their software per se?
How many users would actually be vulnerable to this exploit?
If you know the answers to those questions (the real ones, not the projections from Windows users) then you know why Mac users fee
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Is it possible for the Macintosh to have a major security flaw in the Apache Server?
Of course, in fact it has already happened.
If the Macintosh had a major security flaw in Apache, could there be a Code Red style of attack?
It's possible if the exploit was coded before the patch (which is rare in the extreme on OS X). Also, since Apache is not running by default on OS X, it would hit a tiny number of users and most would not care.
Would Apple release a patch to address the flaw in Apache, even though
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
Precisely!
What we're seeing is Apple fixing issues that cannot be successfully exploited on 90%+ of the Mac machines in existence. Worms like Code Red or Blaster wouldn't be able to find enough hosts due to the default security setup of OS X. The only folks who would be vulnerable would be the ones who know enough about internet hosting to enable a service.
While there's no guarantee that these users are significantly more educated, they do at least know that they're running a potentially exploitable service. This is in direct opposition to the situations that made Code Red and Blaster possible. Had IIS Personal Server not enabled itself without the knowledge of most users, it's highly likely that Code Red would have failed to spread. (Especially since a security patch had been available in both cases.)
What the URL (Score:3, Funny)
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It's short for "Universal Reason for Litigation", and is something big IP owners use to obtain money from people who have very little of it.
You know what, you're right! (Score:5, Funny)
Bad, Apple, bad. *thwacks Apple with rolled up newspaper*
Don't break any fixes anymore, you're supposed to be perfect.
31 fixes (Score:2)
so... (Score:3, Funny)
It's hardly news that if someone goes looking for problems they find them - what is more revealing is the general response to the issues discovered:
Windows: 'well that's what you get when you write closed source crap and you try and bleed money out of your customers'.
Apple: 'That'll wipe the smiles off their smarmy faces'.
Linux: 'Oh we so good - look at how open source instantaneously fixes these problems, cures cancer and helps little orphans'.
all these above responses are of course propaganda (please refrain from using that awful, awful word "fud").
It's ironic that one of the hottest topics on slashdot, climate warming is accused of being one of the most tainted sciences but when it comes to something much simpler, the efficacy of patches on modern systems it turns into the biggest mud slinging match you could imagine.
pfft. quantity of fixes means nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
These numbers mean nothing at all.
First, it's the number of fixed bugs, not of existing bugs. If product A has 500 holes and fixes 5 of them, and product B has 50 holes and fixes 10 of them - these dumbwit journalists would tell you that product A is more secure.
Two, quantity alone means nothing. If product A has 5 remote root holes and product B has 20 spelling bugs - these dumbwit journalists would tell you that product A is more secure.
The worst thing is that they get paid for producing this kind of misinformation. No, wait - the worst part is that there are lots of people out there who don't know technology and actually believe that crap.
Come and see the snobbery inherent in Linux! (Score:3, Informative)
Fantastic! So what the poster is saying is that "If you're on slashdot and you're not a Linux geek you're out of place here".
Out of place as in not welcome for the most part too considering some of the groupthink that goes on.
Just try to get a valid, non-snobbish answer to a n00b Linux question around here. I dare you. Just like the snobs on #Linux. Try it there and you'll get the same.
The day I decided that Linux wasn't for me was the day I went to #Linux and asked for the name of a good distro a n00b could run without pulling out his hair. The response was directing me to DistroWatch or some-such site with nothing more than a list of distros. Out of 40 people this is the lone answer I got.* Great. And yet Linux users still claim Joe Sixpack is welcome to try to adopt? It sounds more like throwing down the gauntlet as opposed to inviting him in.
* Later I tried DSL and Mepis. While I found nothing "wrong" with them I do find overall Linux support lukewarm at best and I don't have the problems with windows that most claim to have. I just don't see a reason to switch yet. Maybe in a few more years when some of the zealots mature a bit and realize that supporting a product is more than just shouting "OMFG~! It's the best, if you don't like it you're just a fucktard!!11!!" and start producing apps a little bit better than Gimp I'll give it another go.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Spyware/viruses do not mean the OS is insecure, but that the users of it are.
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Spyware and Viruses however usually have NOTHING to do with the security of the OS.
Okay, take a deep breath and reread what you wrote. Spyware and viruses are security problems. If the OS does not handle them, then it has not provided ideal security. The OS is responsible for telling users what it is doing and letting them do what they want. If it is sending thousands of e-mails and they don't know, but would like to, it has failed. If they wanted to run a game, but did not want that game to have permiss
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"Tic-Tac-Toe.exe is attempting to send an email, but is not a known email program. Do you want to allow this?"
That's part of why my server is NetBSD on MIPS... (Score:2)
Anything that will trip up attacks (different OS, instruction set) can help. Certainly if there were a determined attacker who cared about getting into my server in particular the 'oddness' of it wouldn't stop them, but for worms expecting the usual suspects it should be enough.
No duh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps, security-wise, the OS choice really boils down to a 'pick-your-poison X user-base' equation?
Yeah, like, everyone knows that all OSes are, like, equal in all respect. It's not like they were designed differently or anything. It's all just 1s and 2s anyway. Every computer gets cloggged up with worms, viruses, and malware. It's just that there are more Windows users out there, and the Mac users just keep quiet about their virus infestations, so they can keep the Sacret Cult of the Mac going strong. I know plenty of Mac users who have to do clean installs all the time because their machines get so clogged up with worms and viruses. All of these whiners talk like that's not true!
Whew! (Score:2, Funny)
Philosophy of pick-your-poison (Score:3, Insightful)
Although you multiply poison by the user base, the more people that use Linux the more secure it becomes. The more people that use an OS where the users cannot find and fix problems, the less secure it becomes as an overall platform.
A large part of the problem is finding it, and when a security flaw is found in Linux it is pretty much always fixed So, userbase for Linux is good because they can fix the problems themselves, or report it directly to someone who can.
But when you are sourceless, a large userbase can report a problem and they must depend on someone else to fix it. So, the more people that use it, the more people using it with a particular bug. Usually, the fix timeframe is based on Impact * number of reports, and although Microsoft has gotten pretty good about turnaround time for patches, they used to be horrible and if there's a lack of reports I suspect bugs will go unpatched for quite some time. However, you still have the issue that all closed source has: the user can't fix things for himself and that includes bugs.
Lastly, comparing OSX to Linux and WinXP isn't really fair to Apple... they're still relatively new to the scene and have a lot of bugs to shake out. And when comparing, you can't just say "N bugs in X OS over K days", you have to also multiply this by the impact. 31 local DoS security fixes is not as scary as 1 remote execution fix.
It Never Did (Score:4, Funny)
It never did. First of all, you can't compare security of operating systems, because you can't eliminate bias from your tests. Secondly, Apple's OS is closed source, which you can never trust. Thirdly, much of the OS is written in unsafe languages (particularly C, C++, and, perhaps, Objective C - I don't know if the last is unsafe), and thus, the statistical probability that it will contain security holes is high. Finally, I don't think Mac OS X has been so thouroughly scrutinized by security experts as Windows has, so it's very well possible that Windows is more secure by now, regardless of it's starting position. However, we will never know that, because of the first point.
I'm sorry, but that's just wrong. (Score:2)
Secondly, Apple's OS is closed source, which you can never trust.
is just wrong, which anyone who frequents slashdot should know by now. Apple Open Source [apple.com] includes most of the operating system, and much of the rest is built on other open source projects such as Apache and Mysql.
Heck, if you had looked at the list of fixes, many of them are actually updates to newer versions of open source packages, such as ClamAV.
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Note that even your test is severely biased: if you find 100 random Windows users and 100 random OpenBSD users,
I have to say that one of those fixes is... (Score:2)
On the other hand, the recently announced problem with DMG files is down right scary.
MS FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Free software is not supposed to be 'much bette (Score:2)
I'd prefer my current OS of choice to remain relatively safe. If everyone in the world used it, then people would bother to hack it more. Let them keep their sucky OSes
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You are relying on security through obscurity [wikipedia.org]. There are arguments for it, but they are generally frowned upon. Certainly around Slasdhot :-)
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I do. That's why I called it "imitation".
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Additionally, I'm pretty sure MacOS came out before January 2003 When FreeBSD 5.0 was released [freebsd.org]
Actually, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], though not the best source available, it was based on OPENSTEP/NEXTSTEP. This also reports the release as 1999/2001 depending on version.
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No, it was supposed to be a successor to NeXTSTEP. And both OS's use a Mach kernel. IMHO, it's a poor successor, since NeXTSTEP had a unified filesystem structure. OS X lacks it, instead imitating OS 9 and below in the Finder and being rather UNIX-y everywhere else. And tools like Spotlight work poorly. Spotlight can be controlled (as root only) from a UNIX-shell. But it can't index networked v
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Seems a bit harsh on the server.
I see your point for indexing some data volumes, but they're not typically automounted, unless you have a very static user profile.
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It doesn't have multiple computers index at once, believe it or not. It uses a protocol that designates one of the computers using the root directory of the resource as a "master" indexer, the others are "slaves." After the indexing is done, the copy of the index on the resource itself is "published" to a local copy on all the computers connected to the resource - that local copy is periodically upda
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"based off" isn't the same as "is", because the OS X kernel (XNU) isn't a Microkernel. This Apple document says as much:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Co nceptual/KernelProgramming/Mach/chapter_6_section_ 1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000905-CH209-TPXREF 101 [apple.com]
Here's the relevant quote:
"in Mac OS X, Mach is linked with other kernel components into a single kernel address space. This is primarily for performance; it is much faster to make a direct cal
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Also, I thought earlier versions of OS X, at some point prior to X.4, they still had a microkernel. I know threads were actually added to the Kernel in X.4.
Having used both, I know OS X is not the same as FreeBSD, I much prefer the FreeBSD system to be honest, but that's just my not-so-humble oppinion.
What part of FreeBSD did Apple use I wonder? I thought userland was still pretty generic across BSD with only minor changes, the filesystem
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"Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple's MkLinux project, in Mac OS X Server, and in
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As well they should. (Score:4, Insightful)
Therefore, they don't have people saying 'fixes for 31 vulnerabilities in its OS'
Re:I predict... (Score:5, Funny)
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Damn. Gotta be a pretty cheap date to whore out for a BSD-licensed OS!
Seriously, man, you've got your terminology all wrong. Whores do it for money. While OpenBSD users don't object to getting paid for it, mostly we do it for free 'cuz we like it. That makes us sluts.
If you'd ever gotten laid without paying for it, you'd know about this stuff.
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Arnt[sic] most of the "flaws" actually trojans? In which case you have to execute them (and thus give your username and password or do some other action) to even run them and let them do their bad things?
These are potential holes that have been fixed. Some are issues where data (like a font or disk image) despite being just data could execute code. Some are remote holes that could lead to a remote compromise without user interaction. Some are ways to locally or remotely crash something or locally escalat
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I thought it was a pretty well-established fact at this point that Mac OS X is considered to be more secure not because it is less vulnerable to attacks, but because it is a less desirable target for attacks.
It's both. Macs don't have the numbers that make botnet operators look to make a worm. They do, however, have a lot of valuable data and make just as nice of control channels as a Linux box somewhere. There are a lot of credit card numbers and the like on Macs. The thing is, they're also a lot harder
"OS X = Sweden" (Score:2)
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Just yesterday I was down working with some developers. There were four rather old G4 Powerbooks and one new (3 months old) PC. Four PowerBooks running flawlessly. PC was already riddled with spyware and viruses and not working properly because of such. These poor people have an unusable computer because of all these security flaws...well...PC-specific flaws. Luckily they kept chugging along on their old Macs while the PC was
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It's not security through obscurity but what makes a better target. Right now, breaking OS X might get you bragging rights, but thats about it. More and more malware is written by people with financial goals, not to get the actual information on individual computers but as a stepping stone to something much better. Why go after individual CC numbers when
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Don't go to skeezy sites - porn indices & poker. Stick it behind a hardware firewall. I'd use a LinITX box running IPCop and Copfilter, but that's just me. Run good antivirus (Avast or Kaspersky seem to work for me, Norton/McAfee worked poorly and slowed things down too much).
-b.
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Except Microsoft Windows isn't the most used OS in the world. A UNIX is- everybody who uses a web browser is looking at a web page- very likely to be served by a UNIX server. I think the sheer number of zombies (about 60% of Microsoft's user b