XP vs Mac OS X

No it doesn't because there aren't any OSX viruses (there haven't been any viruses on any Mac OS for many many years).

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Oh goodie! you're going to supply me with the source code for SolidWorks so that I can Compile it myself in Linux, Yeah right! Why didn't I think of that? Bob

Can you name a few running around in the wild? Right now there are hundreds of particularly nasty windows viruses in the wild. Can you even name one mac virus running around in the wild?

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They are not running around in the wild, because they are basically unable to take over the MAC, and move themselves around the planet via the net. That is why there may be MAC viruses, but the damage is minimal, and hardly makes the news. One windows virus can infect millions of PCs. One MAC virus is hard pressed to get anyone to notice it beyond the individual user.

As has been beaten to death already, that is why windows is such a mark for hackers. Its easy to make windows do all the work for you.

I have used OS/2 for over a dozen years. Never had one virus. A) most folks won't bother with it because it is not mainstream, and B) its damn hard to write a virus that will do anything more than muck up on computer. Hard to get famous when your virus gets in one machine and dies right there of loneliness....

P.S. A google search is not the best method of verifying stuff, as after the first 100 hits of almost any subject, the rest are usually quite obscure, and unrelated to the intent of the search.

JB

I have no idea what you have found with Google, but for the sake of accuracy I ought to elaborate on my rather trite initial response:

Macs are supplied without any anti-virus applications and the majority of them go through life without having any installed. If there were viruses capable of being propagated through the Mac community, I would have expected to have come across a mention of them on 'uk.comp.sys.mac' at some time since the introduction of OSX - but I haven't.

The occasional enquiry on 'uk.comp.sys.mac' as to whether or not to install anti-virus software is usually met with the response that it often causes trouble and does no good because there are no viruses for it to work on. ...I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the morals of software vendors.

In the past (OS6 & 7), I believe there were some viruses, but they were only propagated on floppy discs and only if certain system components were turned on. PC viruses will infect a Mac if it is running PC emulation, but only whilst it is in PC mode. I also understand that some Microsoft documents can be infected in some way and that the Mac might be able to pass on the infected files without becoming infected itself. ....but that is as bad as it gets.

I have used OS8.6 without protection for many years and regularly receive PC viruses in e-mail, they just hang around in the junk folder until the next tidy-up. I've tried to get them to run just for the hell of it, and they won't. Many of my correspondents run Macs , none of them use virus protection (as far as I know) and I have never received a virus from any of them.

It is impossible to prove a negative - there may be some Mac viruses out there that I know nothing about - but currently Mac owners and vendors and repairers in the UK are reporting a complete absence of viruses and have been doing so for at least the last five years.

Uh, can I get back to you on this? :-)

Thanks, Rich

How's debugging, single stepping, the libraries ? They are hardly as easy to work with as Delphi. Yes, I know and have Kylix.

Protel ?

Indeed.

:-)

Rene

But can it then wreak wreak havoc on another user? I think not.

With Windows 2000, on the other hand, if yiou do an install and then try to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com to get the security patches, you get infected and start infecting others as soon as you connect to the internet, far too fast for you to apply the security fixes. Then the Virii disable your ability to load security fixes. I have

With Slackware linux, setting up a new system involves aswering a few questions, starting the install, and getting a cup of coffee.

I don't have an OS X box yet, but I bet that it's just as easy. Strike that; EASIER - I suspect that there are fewer questions to answer.

April, 2005 press release:

DVForge Challenges Symantec CEO To Produce Evidence Of Mac Virus

Today, the CEO of DVForge, Inc. issues the following public challenge to the CEO of Symantec Corporation.

"This challenge is to John Thompson, CEO of Symantec corporation, and is based on statements issued by his company in and in response to its Internet Security Threat Report, issued in March." said Jack Campbell, DVForge, Inc. CEO, "The report and the several following statements issued by Symantec representatives very cleverly used vague assertions and innuendo to promote the idea that an in-the-wild, self-replicating virus that is effective against the modern Mac OS X operating system is possible, and is in fact a serious threat to Mac users. If anyone in my company made such dangerously erroneous public statements, I would fire them on the spot. Since I cannot fire anyone inside Symantec, I am specifically challenging Mr. Thompson to either produce scientifically valid evidence that such a Mac OS X virus is possible, or to publicly retract his company's claims."

Campbell continues, "The Mac OS X operating system is crafted and shipped from Apple with a set of security features enabled that make the infection of the machine by a network based virus, without the user overriding those features impossible. For Mr. Thompson to support his company's claims that such a virus actually is possible is creating substantial financial damage to all companies selling products or services to Apple computer users, by wrongly spreading disinformation that lowers the overall sales of Mac systems to new users. That means his company is costing my company sales of our Apple accessory products. And, that makes me mad."

"Mr. Thompson, I am calling on you to put up or shut up. Show the industry your evidence that such an in-the-wild OS X virus is indeed possible. Or, publicly retract your company's previously stated position," concludes Campbell.

Aha, so a microkernel must prevent the user from doing anything... Smart choice because the biggest security risc is not the OS, but the user.

Messaging is way... way slower than calling functions directly. Besides, you don't have to use static binding. See loading libraries at runtime, Corba or DCOM. BTW, I can't see why objective C should make things better. Object oriented programming is a way to design software. Not a guarantee for error free or better software.

Well, you are right about that, but with regards to root attacks, the smaller the kernel, the less likely it is for kernel bugs to allow attacker code to run. That is the most likely means of attack for a network worm, for example, or a file system exploit: get the kernel to run the attacker's code somehow.

Tricking the user into clicking the wrong button, or going to a phishing website is much easier than that, of course.

The point is that objective C has the messaging built in, ala smalltalk. In C++, methods are implemented using function pointers (or simple function calls). There is no explicit runtime. This makes it faster, but prevents you from doing the kinds of things you used to be able to do with smalltalk, like take a random object, implement a 'less-than' method, and then use generic sort routines to order lists of them. With C++, the object would need to be compiled an an ancestor of a 'sortable object' thingy.

The upshot is that you can dynamically change the behavior of existing objects without recompiling them, simply by adding methods.

I'm not saying this is better or worse, I'm just describing it.

Why not? Email applications run with user privs. Getting into an email application using applescript (or whatever they call it these days) should be easy. Thus, email trojan horses should be able to spread just like a windows versions, albeit with different code in them.

Beats me. Last time I installed 2000, (in 2003, I think) it worked without a problem. I have used XP, and it doesn't seem to have this flaw. Are you saying that the windows site is infecting your computer? That is bad, if true.

That is great. I'm happy for them and you. My recent redhat fedora install of the system I'm running on seemed pretty easy, but then again, it required me to compile and install drivers for sound and video, and to recompile the kernel with NTFS support to access my windows files. That was annoying.

Last time I installed an OSX system, it was painless.

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.

Do you have any numbers on this? They don't have much market share.

I just googled a few:

This one is actually a trojan rootkit:

Here is some other strange malware:

The real question is why anybody would bother with Mac OSX? It's clearly more difficult than windows, owing to the reasons I posted elsewhere, and it's market share is about a tenth of what windows has on the desktop.

Also, most new windows viruses/trojans are small modifications of existing code. There are very few new ones. Writing a virus from scratch is pretty hard, I think, even for Windows, particularly a virus that attacks over the network, like a worm. I don't think I've ever heard of one of those for windows, although there was a unix worm 15 or 20 years ago (the 'morris' worm). For windows, they always seem to require some active participation on the user's part, like incorrect email client settings, or running executable enclosures, or starting up infected word documents, or allowing IE to install software. However, I haven't made a study out of these things, so there may be 'better' technology these days.

....which is why QNX is the most bug-free and hardest to attack OS.

If true, I would expect to see the story cited as a reply to the hundreds of challenges that have been posted (some with cash rewards) to supply a single example of a virus infecting an OS X computer "in the wild."

It is also least used. Quite a lot of software runs on it though (I even got Samba to run on it so I could edit sources in a Windows machine).

Still, I'm pretty sure QNX will have some security holes in it because it is optimized for real time processes, not security.

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