On Wed Oct 08, 2003 at 09:00:42 +1000, Visser, Martin (Sydney) wrote: >The Australian yesterday had a column from David Frith on just this >subject >http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,7457276%5E15423%5E%5Enbv >%5E15309,00.html > >A quote: > >"No-one, not even an administrator, is permitted to tinker with the >Mac's core system software, so a Mac OS X virus - and remember, there >are currently none - could theoretically wipe out one user's files, but >wouldn't be able to access any other accounts and couldn't touch the >operating system itself. " > >This comment was quite interesting to me as clearly, all *nixes I am >aware of, root has absolute privelege (after all everything is a file, >and all files make use of the user/group of the running user/process to >determine privelege. How does OSX do things differently.( Or is the >"administrator" nor truly root on OSX?)
Well, the kernel has absolute priviledge. Even root isn't allowed to write directly to directories for example. Of course I think David Frith has it wrong, i mean the administrator is allowed to load device driver, which are modules loaded into the kernel, if that isn't tinkering with the core system software i don't know what is. Benno -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
