I haven't heard the commercial, but Mac OS X is as vulnerable to viruses and worms as FreeBSD. OS X is based on the FreeBSD userland, so any bugs in system daemons are usually shared with OS X's BSD cusions.
Of course, in the Linux/BSD world, we worry about buffer overflows, race conditions, and mis-configured software. Usually our mail clients don't run arbitrary executables and scripts as root like in Windows. And if they did in OS X, their damage would be typically limited to the local user account, as OS X doesn't run as root by default. One could argue that OS X isn't as large of target as Win32, but that is a big can of worms. Literal worms, not Microsoft worms. Mark On Sat, 2003-10-11 at 00:57, Craig H. Block wrote: > Have you guys heard that new commercial for the local Mac retailer saying > how the new Mac OS is almost invulnerable to computer viruses. Is that a > load or what? Is the Mac OS a really good system? Is it in fact more Unix > like as the add claims? > > Thanks, > > - Craig > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Mark C. Ballew" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 4:41 PM > Subject: [RLUG] Microsoft says security is important > > > ....but says free speech isn't: > > "I wish those people just would be quiet," he said of computer researchers > who publish vulnerabilities in Microsoft's products. "It would be best for > the world. That's not going to happen, so we have to work in the right > fashion with these security researchers."-- Steve Ballmer > > (link: > http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/washpost/20031010/tc_washpost/a6043_2003oct9) > > Thanks for letting us know what is good for us, Steve. > > Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
