From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Apr 12 2:42:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.unixathome.org (ns1.unixathome.org [203.79.82.27]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1361E37B43F for ; Thu, 12 Apr 2001 02:42:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@langille.org) Received: from wocker (root@ns1.unixathome.org [192.168.0.20]) by ns1.unixathome.org (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f3C9gpe01529 for ; Thu, 12 Apr 2001 21:42:52 +1200 (NZST) (envelope-from dan@langille.org) Message-Id: <200104120942.f3C9gpe01529@ns1.unixathome.org> From: "Dan Langille" Organization: novice in training To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 05:42:46 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: comp.risks mentions BSD and Mac OS X Reply-To: dan@langille.org X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org This just arrived via the moderated newsgroup comp.risks (Message-ID: ): Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 21:17:56 -0500 From: "Craig S. Cottingham" Subject: Re: Future Mac Viruses? (PC Rescue, RISKS-21.32) > Mac users have been crowing for some time that their system is less prone to > viruses than the horrible alternative. Could this be about to change? First off, any person who claims that Mac OS is less *susceptible* to viruses than the "horrible alternative" is mistaken. The greater part of Mac OS's relative dearth of viruses is due to "security through obscurity" -- in this case, a much smaller developer base. All the tools you need to write code for Mac OS, virulent or not, have been freely available for download from Apple's web site for more than two years. > "The box contains three installation CDs -- Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1 and a CD > full of developer tools, including the Cocoa programming environment, which > is reportedly simple enough for school kids to use." Secondly, Linux has included, from day one, developer tools simple enough for school kids to use, as evidenced by the number of open source projects started by students. (The most notable example that comes to mind is Napster; I believe its author was a high school student when he created it.) Following that logic, there should be a preponderance of viruses for Linux. Instead, there are, to my knowledge, none. (Worms which exploit security holes in daemons are a horse -- a Trojan horse? -- of a different color.) The security model built into Linux and other Unix-like operating systems -- of which BSD, on which Mac OS X is built, is one -- contrasts sharply with the security model, such as it is, built into the variants of Windows. So right from the start, Mac OS X is starting from ground more solid than either its predecessor or that "horrible alternative." What remains to be seen is how well Apple has balanced the Unix-like security model with the expectations of a user base that is used to having free run of the machine. I haven't installed Mac OS X on any of my machines yet, but it appears from the posts to one OS X mailing list that the security model is obvious for tasks which require superuser rights. Craig S. Cottingham http://pgp.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA2FFBE41> -- Dan Langille pgpkey - finger dan@unixathome.org | http://unixathome.org/finger.php got any work? I'm looking for some. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message