theregister.co.uk — Next time you get nagged to install Apple's Safari browser keep this in mind: The company's security team has dismissed research that shows a simple way for miscreants to use the browser to litter an end user's machine with malicious files.
May 15, 2008 View in Crawl 4
rdsmith1May 16, 2008
Says who? You'll have that with any group of fanboys, but too many people assume that all mac users think that everything that apple does is perfect and that they're never wrong. That couldn't be farther from the truth.Just look at Leopard's initial release. A lot of people hated the translucent menu bar and the fact that you could no longer view docked folders in list view. They stirred up a huge ****storm about it, and what did apple eventually do? They gave the option to make the menu bar opaque, and gave back the option to view docked folders in list view. Apple gets plenty of flack from their customer base of plenty of things, but it's usually fanboy zealotry that drowns that kind of stuff out.
deizelMay 16, 2008
I know what you mean, Microsoft was really effective in Mac's back yard with their Internet Explorer releases. Fail tbh.
rdsmith1May 17, 2008
I never made any contention about the time that it took, I never said that nothing was exploited, and I never said anything about Linux or Windows, did I? No, I didn't, so your first response is completely pointless.How is my comment about how long OS X has been out "another mactard comment"? OS 8 and 9 had malware, including viruses and trojans, and the mac market share was far less then than it is now. Yes, OS X can have malware, and yes it can have viruses and trojans, but all 3 or 4 proofs of concept that have been created in the 7 years that OS X has been around have all required action by the user, as in manually downloading an image file, manually opening said image file, manually opening whatever file(s) it contained, AND inputing the user's admin password for ANYTHING to happen. It's how OS X is built, as well as almost any heavily Unix-based OS. The "security via obscurity" argument is a myth, and what I pointed out about OS 8 and 9 proves that.No, OS X is NOT perfect, and you're right -- OS X has had security holes that went unpatched for years. But honestly, nothing EVER happened in the time that they were unpatched, and if OS X is not at all inherently more secure, as you're implying, then why was nothing ever achieved in the wild? If OS X's lack of malware and in-the-wild hacks is explained entirely by lack of market share and nothing else, then how do you explain that even with Apple's ever-increasing market share with every year, the number of real virues, trojans and real-life (as in, not in a closed environment at a hacking convention) attacks is still at 0? And no, Apple's defense is NOT scarceness... that's the excuse given by other people, who usually don't like Apple, and it's the very argument that you just used above.
quantumstatejimMay 17, 2008
The default does make you confirm every download. There is even a small countdown for the confirmation so that the site cannot pop up the box suddenly and have you clicking it accidentally.
cthellisJun 2, 2008
Both Apple and Microsoft need to get off their asses and fix the vulnerabilities. Apple especially needs to figure out who made that comment that's being quoted, because if indeed said vulnerability is "not being treated as a security issue," then they are plainly retarded. Smack that idiot upside the head and get on with it.That being said, has there ever been a time where Microsoft has effectively said "...and for Pete's sake, do NOT use IE until we can figure out how to fix this!" every time there's been a similarly-bad exploit in IE through their long, long history of IE exploits?