On 26 Nov 2005 at 9:55, dhbailey wrote: > Javier Ruiz wrote: > [snip]> > > I don´t agree, because you can _now_ buy a cheap small factor PC > > now, hook it to your existing monitor and there you go. You don´t > > need more to make a good virus trap. Besides the price factor is > > becoming less and less important when buying Mac hardware (except in > > the higest G5 models). > > > > It will also be interesting to see if virus-writers now go after Macs, > since they'll be sharing the same hardware.
Viruses don't run on the hardware -- they run on the applications and the OS. So, OS X on MacIntel will be just as "immune" to viruses as OS X is currently, which means immune by obscurity, in that the virus writers haven't turned their attention to it because it's not worth it when they can easily target 10X more computers. But there's also the issue that OS X's default setup is an LUA configuration (i.e., running with user-level permissions, not admin), so any damage that a virus *can* do is much less than on your default Windows setup (which is running as an administrator). But given that a large number of the exploits circulating on Windows are socially engineered to get a human to execute them (rather than executing automatically), there's nothing in particular that protects Mac users from those, except that nobody seems to be writing them (which may be, in part, because they can't do as much damage). But the advent of OS X running on MacIntel won't change this situation one iota. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
