The most common exploit for viruses etc. is buffer overrun – put executable code in an OS buffer then jump to it. The Windows OS does not guard against buffer overrun – efficiency, you know. It also does not protect against executing that code which is, by its nature, is in executive (root) mode.

Hope this clears up some things.

Apps don’t demand root access. That’s a basic principle behind UNIX, one that Microsoft has scoffed at for years. When I switched to UNIX-based OSes a couple years ago, I was surprised at just how many changes that meant. Even if the sysadmin hasn’t installed some standard graphics library, I can put it in my home directory, link to it in my .bashrc file, and use it all I want without screwing up the main system. Because…

Apps don’t demand root access.

Mac OSX descends from Next’s NextStep OS, not Free BSD (which started around 1993). NextStep is from well before 1993.

DEC VMS operating was not Unix nor was it Unix like. I loved it anyways. I SysAdmin’d both.

I do not know how much of VMS ended up Windows NT, but many of the low level systems parameters were the same, which I found quite amusing.

Unix is a relatively secure OS; it has been under attack for forty years. Most of the flaws have been fixed long ago. Mac OSX is a Unix03 certified OS based, in part, on FreeBSD.

The security problem on the Internet is Windows with almost all of the attacks.

Security is a never ending problem, but ending the use of Windows computers would clean up the web. The Windows OS was never designed to be multiuser. It is a stand alone disk system. It cannot be fixed after the fact.

http://rixstep.com/1/20100119,00.shtml

Microsoft needs to start all over or put a hypervisor under Windows. Microsoft is unlikely to approve of either solution. The first breaks all their application and the second proclaims themselves to be incompetent. They would rather delude their customers into thinking that malware and antivirus software is just the price of running computers.

Here is a bout a 17 year old bug in DOS which has been carried forward in every upgrade including windows 7. Yes, you can do DOS in Windows, now. Crazy.

http://rixstep.com/1/20100120,00.shtml

“The best study out there is that fact that 90%+ of companies out there are still running PCs instead of Macs.”

Is there any reason that companies have to be smart?

Besides, there are historical reasons for that market share. Microsoft Windows was the beneficiary of all the computers sold running DOS. That is all talking about the effects of history, What about today?

Apple is showing 30% sales growth a year. It doesn’t take too many years of that to have a real effect on market share. If so, you will have to find a new rationale for disliking Macs.

If this is the case, and if we have not yet reached real market saturation of the criminal enterprise, then most development is still done to target the richest rewards for the least effort. Botnets are low value; they don’t generate huge revenue. Getting access to a credit card database — there is real money. As long as 90%+ of businesses use Windows, and there any degree of increased difficulty with the other 10%, and we have not reached saturation, almost all truly new, criminal malware development work will target Windows. Especially when the later resell value of the code depends on the market size it can be used against.

As such, I don’t think Max OS X is in more inherently secure than, for example, my favorite personal OS (FreeBSD). But I think it has significant market advantage at the moment, which it will continue to enjoy for some time.

How long? I don’t know. But the change, when it comes, could be rather abrupt.

My $0.02. I’ve been working in the field of network operations and internet security in one way or another for the last 15 years. Please take all of my opinions with the noted limitations that I have not done a detailed study or analysis of the topic; just my impression from accumulated exposure.

I’d like to hear more about this database integration issue.

Some examples. (1) The original IBM PC, from which all windows machines descend, was envisioned as a smart terminal to connect to IBM mainframes. From the beginning PC’s had software to make this possible. (2) DOS, which underlay Windows until IIRC 2000 made batch processing of alphanumeric data possible. You could chain apps together as you do on UNIX to flexibly perform complex task. (3) Windows machines began shipping standard with an OBCD implementation back in the early 1990′s. It did not ship standard on the Mac until 10.2 in 2003.

Back in the 90′s, the PC advantage in database networking was definitive. I worked at Apple supporting Apple servers and networking and Apple’s low range server management just didn’t compare. Oh, they were easy to set up and manage but they couldn’t do things like put users in multiple logical groups and then assign permissions to a particular group. That made it cumbersome to manage user access in large scale environments. Macs had an edge in simple file servers but once you had hundreds of users and applications things broke down.

I think the biggest advantage is Visual Basic which makes it quick and easy to bang out customized database front ends. There is nothing comparable on the Mac. Realbasic makes a good run but it does not compare to scope and depth of the Visual Basic ecosystem.

This is not to mention the talent pool that exist for Windows database integration versus that for the Mac.

I’d like to hear more about this database integration issue. It is either something I haven’t noticed in 20 years or so of IT work, or I know it by another name.

How does this advantage work? What technologies are you talking about here? Does Windows have some kind of built in query capability at the OS level?

You’re not just talking about Access being Windows only and LotusNotes being nearly so are you?

Thanks.

John

The best study out there is that fact that 90%+ of companies out there are still running PCs instead of Macs.

Heh. It’s true, the market is the best test there is.

I think that is largely because of Windows database handling capabilities instead of the cost of the platform itself.

Windows and Macs are not really directly comparable because they radically divergent design goals from the outset. Windows is designed to first and foremost to link into large institutional databases and everything else is secondary. Macs by contrast are designed for individualistic, decentralized computing. Schools, small businesses, professionals and freelancers. Macs place emphasis on the data the user creates and not there ability to access and manipulte data created by others.

I really think this is why Macs are more secure. Thier design philosophy has always been that they will be used by individuals without immediate geek support. Windows by contrast is designed from the presumption that computer professional will be on hand.

The cost of ownership studies are sound and they are used largely to refute the idea that Macs are like sportscars to the Windows sedan i.e. something only the upper income can afford. In reality, Macs are lifecycle cost competative with PCs in most cases. Of course, that assumes that the user is starting from scratch and doesn’t have to retrain or buy new software.

And the killer is it wouldn’t matter if Macs were half the price because they don’t have the easy database intergration that Windows does. Until they do, or until database intergration moves to platform agnostic formats like the web, java or dot-Net, Macs won’t make a lot of inroads. Linux has the same problem.

Even if that happens, most people will use something other than Macs because a single company can’t produce a majority of the computers in the world.

The best study out there is that fact that 90%+ of companies out there are still running PCs instead of Macs.

They are about as difficult to hack as any *nix, probably a little easier but I have not tried so I’m guessing.

It’s the FreeBSD part that keeps em’ relatively safe.

The problem is that this group is relatively few in numbers. If computers are to spread out to the wider public, it must be made ever easier to use. Yet, these same experts will decry this process. They repeatedly call easy-to-use computers to be a toy. Command line computing was for the real computer users, they said.

I recently saw, on YouTube, a one year old baby controlling an iPhone. That would make it rather easy-to-use, wouldn’t you say? The iPad uses the same operating system. It should be cheap enough, fast enough and good enough to satisfy people who want to gain a Computer’s advantages and its access to the Internet, but without the complexity.

If so, the iPad should to well with the 50% of Americans who do not use computers now. These people are notoriously non technical or anti-technological. They represent a computer market which neither Google nor the Wintel manufacturers can satisfy.

iPad, not the maxiPad.

I’m sure you are aware that it is possible to run Windows on a Mac in a separate partition. Windows has been tested to run the fastest on Mac computers. It is safer too, since you can delete that partition, if unrecoverable malware hits you. You can reload the Windows OS from a Flash drive and be up again, quickly.

So, if there are Windows applications which you must use, then you can have the best of both worlds.

Usually, though, most of the people who expected to utilize Windows often, discover work arounds and substitutions so they can avoid Windows.

There is a, month long, learning curve which people must go though on a Mac. But, once they have become acclimated, people tend to dislike using Windows for some reason.

Buying cheap is usually a bad bargain in any product. If you compare Name Brands computers, such as Dell or HP, which have comparable features to a Mac, the price is almost the same. If you are comparing a Mac to a White Box manufacturer, then it requires that you be an expert to determine if you are actually receiving a bargain.

Studies of the Total Cost of Ownership of keeping a Mac or a PC for four years, is that a PC costs about three times more to maintain. Employees are more productive on Macs and have a more enjoyable user experience. That is why Apple has the highest user satisfaction rating in the industry.

Mac users experience less aggravation than PC owners; how important is it to you to keep from cursing out your computer? Is peace of mind worth anything to you?

Well, actually there’s based on.. and there’s based on. Conceptually, OS X is based on FreeBSD. OS X also borrows a lot of tools from FreeBSD. ”

If Mac OSX is only, conceptually, based upon FreeBDS, how do you explain that Mac OSX is UNIX03 certified? There are many versions of Unix which aren’t UNIX03. Linux isn’t. You can download BSD and linux files, recompile and run them in Terminal application.

From the viewpoint of the FOSS community, the Mac isn’t UNIX, but that is, merely, Linux bigotry.

You are right in that Apple uses UNIX as a foundation for it GUI. But, that doesn’t keep many scientific users from utilizing it as a UNIX computer, though.

“The operating system makes itself look very much like FreeBSD to user-level applications. But at it’s heart it is Carnegie-Mellon’s Mach micro-kernel, which Steve Jobs bought rights to when he started Next to boot-strap his NeXTStep OS. ”

The idea was not to reinvent the wheel; Steve took the best thinking of the universities. Micro kernels were the fad back in the late 80′s. Apple’s modified kernel doesn’t do too badly on tests, even though it is utilized to favor its GUI, rather than optimized for Unix software. We could probably spend days discussing the differences (and benefits) between microkernels and monolithic Linux. But, let’s not. It is too rancorous a subject.

“By the way, Apple _had_ to buy NeXTStep because Steve Jobs made it a requirement when he came back. ”

I believe you have that backwards; the OS was the real draw. Apple could have bought BeOS, but it was too light weight and it wasn’t a finished product the way that NeXTstep and Openstep was.

Steve Jobs seems more of an after thought. Apple was very close to going out of business in 1997, but It was in the process of correcting its mistakes. We can’t give Steve Jobs all the credit. Although, I believe he was very helpful in turning Apple around. Over half a year lapsed after NeXT was acquired, before he was placed in charge.

“He was savvy enough to realize that it was a good starting point for a fully-multitasking OS capable of making use of virtual memory and other features that make a good OS.”

NeXTstep was all that by 1993. The problem was that there was no opening for a new OS after 1995. Windows 95 sucked all the oxygen out of development.

Meanwhile, Apple, repeatedly, tried and failed to develop a modern OS. Apple was better off going with a modern OS which actually worked. Even then, it took five years to turn NeXTstep into an OS which the Apple users and developers would tolerate.

“Nobody expected the OS to be as resistant to external attack as it has been. It could be just luck and that Microsoft makes such a lovely, fat target.”

If we could all be this lucky, we would be millionaires.

The UNIX foundations under NeXTstep and Mac OSX, are pretty secure. They were a multi-user system designed for the internet.

Windows is such a fat target because it was never designed to be Multi-user. It still isn’t. It is unclear, to me, what Microsoft plans to do to correct this long term security problem. It can’t turn Windows into a multi-user object oriented OS, without breaking all its applications.

Microsoft must go through the same development hell which Mac OSX put Apple through. It is not yet settled that the bulk of Windows users, who are currently using Windows XP, will migrate to Windows Seven.

“But in answer to the question “When will Mac users will face a sudden tsunami of self-propagating viruses and worms just like Windows’ users do?” ”

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Similar mistakes, I am sure.

When I started using PCs in the ’80s, a VAX cost something like $200k. We were so happy to have access to sub-$10k computers that expanded our productivity several fold that we didn’t care about the obvious limitations and difficulty of use. I think that some of that attitude has carried forward with Windows even as the hardware and software have become many orders of magnitude more powerful and even cheaper. It just isn’t as good as it should be. When you think about it, if you were designing an OS UI from scratch, not having used a small computer before but having some sense of industrial design, there is no way that you would replicate today’s needlessly complex, unintuitive computer control interfaces (PC or Mac).

I agree that Windows is the way to go for most people. Windows and Microsoft have always excelled at database work with is the unglamorous heavy lifting of the computer world. The entire platform is based around connecting to large institutional databases. It does that very, very well. You can grab a copy of Visual Studio and in hours or days bang out a complex and customized database or database front end. Mac and Linux have nothing comparable. People who work with alpha numeric data really have no choice but to go with Windows.

For that matter, it would probably be physically impossible for Apple to provide more than 20% of the worlds computers. Most people will always end up using some kind of open hardware system.

I’m more interested in how we think about and talk about technology issues. Why have we accepted the market share explanation all these years without bothering to test it? Why have accepted even though no one has ever tried to quantify what the magic market share threshold is? Have we accepted the explanation only because we really have no choice but to use Windows if we want to keep the world running? Can we not accept that the world’s economy, governance and dialog is dependent on a flawed technology?

If so, do we make the same mistake in other technological areas?