Ok.. but has BSD been attacked on the scale that MS code has? I would argue no, not even close. Do you believe BSD is invulnerable to attack? Hardly.. Unless you want to go back to text based browsers and kernals that fit on a floppy, it is extermely difficult to eliminate all vulnerabilities in the code of a sophisticated OS. The more complex the system, the easier it is to break, and with the level of automation currently expected by most users, this requires a very complex build. Could MS be made more secure, of course. Do I think they are actively working on the problem, yes. If Novell or Mac had risen to the top of the OS heap, would they be catching all the viruses now? I think they would. Really, my point was not to argue this, but that there is no justification for malicious code, that you can't simply pawn it off on MS as being the real problem. By doing that, you are saying that people creating spyware and viruses are not culpable for their actions, that they should be allowed to create havoc and destroy systems, because really they are only leveraging 'features' built into the operating system. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Niels Bakker" <niels=nanog@bakker.net> To: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 3:31 PM Subject: Re: Spyware becomes increasingly malicious
Sorry, it was a _technical_ question - is MAC OS known as having pests and ad-ware in the comparable numbers (if any)?
* stepnwlf@magma.ca (John Underhill) [Wed 14 Jul 2004, 19:45 CEST]:
This is spurious logic. You are suggesting that Mac is a more secure operating system, and I would suggest that it is probably far less secure, because it has not had to withstand years of unearthing vulnerabilities in the code.
It has. Darwin is based on years of development in BSD code.
-- Niels.
-- Today's subliminal thought is: