Buying a computer, should I get a Mac?

[paul cottingham]

Here's a thought......how about designing operating systems that are secure enough that malware won't affect them? Now there's a novel concept......

OpenBSD is a very tight, secure OS. So is FreeBSD. I have never succeeded in getting a graphical interace working well on them, tho' At least not well enough for a regular user to use it.

[Greg Peterson]

To turn an old gear head phrase, "If it's got bit or drives, you've got problems.".

The stereotypical geek is a quaint stereotype. Even though Stuxnet was built to run on Windows, it was not engineered by some pencil neck geek. Sure, the engineers were probably geeks at one time, but they grew up into talented code wranglers and someone with very deep pockets put them on the payroll.

Digital espionage and crime are a reality of the 21st century. An OS no longer needs to be king of the mountain to be susceptible to attack.

[Bryan Morgan]

Here's a thought......how about designing operating systems that are secure enough that malware won't affect them? Now there's a novel concept......

As much as we fuel the holy war and rip on each OS, I think we can all admit all of these OS's are secure as the user using them. 99.99999999999999999% of the time I've had to repair an OS (Mac, PC, whatever) its because the user has done something stupid. You can argue they should be easier to use or more protected... well, modern cars have all kinds of sensors, airbags, fancy brakes, etc etc etc none of which will do you any good when you plow into a wall at 100 mph. I guess what I'm saying, is instead of blaming the car, how about people start focusing on their driving skills. 99% of what people are calling "viruses" these days really aren't. They are user triggered malware. Like guns, they don't fire themselves, it takes someone to pull the trigger. Ignorance isn't going to to anyone any bit of good. Sure you can put safety nets in your OS but the smart ones will always find a way around. Google images has all kinds of nasty stuff going on right now, but you have to click it first. Everyone hates MS's UAC stuff in Vista/7 but can you blame them? Every thing you click: "Are you SURE you want to do this?" Super annoying to some of us. Of course it can be disabled but you get my point. People need to start learning how to use these things and stop blaming the machine for their own errors. It seems in too many walks of life people are quick to blame everyone and everything else but themselves. We always tell people its an error between the chair and the keyboard.

[Scott Shepherd]

Google images has all kinds of nasty stuff going on right now, but you have to click it first.

And how's the over 50 population that didn't grow up on computers supposed to magically "know" they can't click on a photo from google images? You'd have to be a geek to know that, and 99% of computer users aren't geeks.

People need to start learning how to use these things and stop blaming the machine for their own errors. It seems in too many walks of life people are quick to blame everyone and everything else but themselves. We always tell people its an error between the chair and the keyboard.

Spoken like a true geek. There is absolutely NO FAULT on the USER when they get an email from a FAMILY member that says "Family Photos" and they open it to click on the link, only to find out they now have a virus or malware. How in the world you can blame that on the user is beyond comprehension. I guess we'll have to educate senior citizens that if they get that email, then they have to hover over the link and look for the real url (like anyone but a geek knows what a url is) and compare it to see if there's a mismatch before clicking.

That's an insane request for users.

However, if you have an ipad or a Mac, you can click that and it doesn't matter.

According to Symantec, as of July 2nd (today), here's the stats :

Total Detections (Threats & Risks): 12,113,310 for Windows

Now, let's compare that to Mac. Total known malware or virus that's not protected by the current OS..........wait for it..................zero.

That's 12 MILLIONS vs. Zero. Or, let's give MacDefender the status of active (which it's not, since it's been resolved in the OS update a month ago). So that would make it 12,000,000 vs. 1.

I know which odds I'd rather play with.

[Phil Thien]

Digital espionage and crime are a reality of the 21st century. An OS no longer needs to be king of the mountain to be susceptible to attack.

Amen to that, brother.

Case in point: The virus that was apparently crafted to infect the model of Siemens programmable controller used to run the centrifuges in Iran's enrichment program.

You want to talk specific, you don't get more specific than THAT.

And a crafty virus it is (was?), because it changed the RPM's of the machines just enough that they didn't work. I can't recall if it destroyed the machines or not, my recollection was that it just screwed up the works enough for the engineers to sit there and scratch their heads for months and months.

Apparently it took someone very familiar with Siemens controllers (again, working from memory but I think a Siemens engineer) to find the virus.

THAT is impressive.

[John Coloccia]

Amen to that, brother.

Case in point: The virus that was apparently crafted to infect the model of Siemens programmable controller used to run the centrifuges in Iran's enrichment program.

You want to talk specific, you don't get more specific than THAT.

And a crafty virus it is (was?), because it changed the RPM's of the machines just enough that they didn't work. I can't recall if it destroyed the machines or not, my recollection was that it just screwed up the works enough for the engineers to sit there and scratch their heads for months and months.

Apparently it took someone very familiar with Siemens controllers (again, working from memory but I think a Siemens engineer) to find the virus.

THAT is impressive.

Didn't we blow up a Russian pipeline some time ago with bad code? I forget the details but I seem to recall this.

[paul cottingham]

We always tell people its an error between the chair and the keyboard.

PEBKAC error! Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair! I used to tell my students that it was the most common computer problem. That and the well documented id10t error.

[Phil Thien]

Didn't we blow up a Russian pipeline some time ago with bad code? I forget the details but I seem to recall this.

Yeah, talk about spy vs. spy...

The code was bad. But they weren't supposed to have the code in the first place.

We knew they were going to make an effort steal the technology, so we made sure they got a hacked version. They used it on the Siberian pipeline.

When it blew, it went like a tactical nuke, something like 2.5 or three gigagrams of TNT.

[Jim Becker]

I'm thinking that this topic has, well...been fully covered for the moment...and given some of the dialog getting close to the edge, it's time to let it rest.

Thread closed.

Jim
SMC Moderator