Quote:
Originally posted by SpiritWarrior:
What's with all the replies, I wasn't even serious. Just kidding, yeah okay I figured they sucked. It seems they are instead trying to use the flaws as a marketing technique to make people buy (Virtually no viruses on a Mac - until enough of you buy one, then we're like windows but without the security patches).
|
You make it sound like you won't get security patches if you buy a Mac?! Their rolling out of security updates may be slow in comparison to Linux, but it sure beats 'patch tuesday' followed by 'virus wednesday' followed by a one-month wait for the security fix.
There are still unpatched security vulnerabilities in Microsoft software that they refuse to fix. According to Secunia, with all patches and workarounds applied, Windows XP Home is still affected by 26 documented flaws, some of which are rated
"highly critical". As the code is closed, nobody knows how many undocumented flaws exist.
It is undeniable that a Mac is more secure than Windows out of the box due to its Unix backend, the fact that it doesn't ship with tons of internet-facing services enabled, the fact that the user must create a username and password and is discouraged from running things as root (the administrative user).
Having said that, it sounds like you've already made up your mind on this issue...
One of the Linux magazines I buy ranks distributions according to how fast they release fixes for security issues. The fastest (Red Hat) released a patch for a popular internet service within 20 minutes of the flaw being published. The bulk of the major distributions had released patches within two hours, with only Debian straggling a little with a lag time of a little over a day. Now
that is taking security seriously and I wish the big players would do the same.
[ 08-09-2006, 04:56 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]