07.04.2005 | 14:59
Reuters je ovih dana imao članak - a prenijeli su ga mnogi - temeljen na nedavnom Symantecovom istupu i mišljenju Gartnerova analitičara, s davno poznatom tezom: kako MacOS nije neprobojna platforma iz jednog jedinog razlooga što ga - nema dovoljno. \"Nova\" teza je da se jakim startom prodaje Mac minija povećava udio, a time se i povećava opasnost od napada i na Mac platformu zlonamjernim softverom.
Prepričano, \"nije da macOS nema rupa, samo ih nitko ne koristi jer ne može napraviti veliku štetu\".
Takav članak, bez imalo daljnjih istraživanja, prenio je čak i jedan Wired. To me jako razljutilo, pa sam otpisao teti Alison Macondray, koja za Wired vodi blog Cult of the Mac, u kojemu je prenesen i taj Reurtersov članak.
www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66989,00.html
Međutim, formular za komentare toga članka na neku foru nije radio.
Poslao sam ga mailom. Što sam odgovorio?
Nemam vremena da prevedem, ali to je zapravo nastavak moje teme o Appleovom tržišnom udjelu... Evo ga:
You really believe that Symantec is an impartial side in such subject not to examine what they are really talking about?
Well, since May 1995 (very naive QuickTime Autostart worm, triggered by enabled automatic startnig the music when audio CD is inserted, which should be disabled) there were none od any malware. I can uderstand the wish of some segments of IT business to stay in it, but manufacturer of Virex and NAV up to date really didn't have had the justification on what these software companies were paid for alll these years. Yes, it is important for everybody if they simple don't walk out of it, and there must be a way for finance the \"staying awake in the business\" for the sake of Apple and users.
In such style of hype -- presuming that \"bad hackers ignore Mac besacuse their only goal is to make as bigger damage it is possible\" -- you put aside the main problem: organized crime whch uses everything to dig out money counting on big numbers: by spam (and responses of inexperienced), gambling, pornography. And, as well, spyware of all kinds -- involving people and machines in just \"innocent\" (but without individual acceptance) if market survey, over inspecting computers
about content of legal software, to such global methods as are described in March 13. report on \"honeynet.org\" by which anonymous criminal could blackamale financial and government sites clustering and having under control parts of computing resources of thousands individual machines on net by just small piece of executive code \"living\" in nearly \"everybody's\" machine.
\"Cheap mac\" will not make the difference even if MacOS took 50% of installed machines. Why? because development cycle of MacOS (whole new version from scratch) is one year -- and users are complaining it is too fast to get accustomed to new features. And the development cycle for Windows is... you know... we will see when Longhorn becomes reality. Every time this cycle is longer and longer, using more and more programers (you know also their internal code about exchanging
informations on job they are performing -- it is intended to be water-tight by each individual contract) and having less and less time to test, figure out possible security hazards - and to fix them. That is why OpenSource community can react very quickly on any kind of attack, or anticipation, and the response time of Microsoft on REAL reports of something happening is up to - you better know then me (I assume two weeks, if they put the case under consideration).
The sitting duck for attacks in this case is NOT majority, the number of Wintel computers out there, but incredible number od holes in Windows. Not the \"bigger damage\" but \"the easier job done\".