apple macs

NathanE · 12 Jan 2007 at 21:46

"Security through obscurity" is actually a valid form of security. However it has a major disadvantage in that it isn't a long term solution and should definately not be apart of any business plan. It can work very well for certain types of products, it even worked fine for operating systems before the Internet came along. Nowadays though it is a definate no-no for almost all types of software.

Firefox is a good example of security through obscurity failing for a product.

I'm quite fond of Mac's too but until they get a worthwhile development platform that I'm interested in (read: .NET) I won't be buying one. (So by that logic I should be buying one in about 6-8 months :eek:

) I'm sure that rings the same for most of the world's developers too. C++ is becoming too tiresome to develop GUI-based applications with. Java and .NET especially have spoilt us.

Mr_White · 12 Jan 2007 at 22:19

The reason Macs don't get viruses is not because there are not enough people that use them or hackers aren't interested, or any of that crap.

It's the infrastructure of the filesystem that keeps them safe from viruses. For each file there is a Check file that ensures the integrity of the file. A virus isnt able to incorperate itself in the check file and thus any file that were to get infected would be corrected. or request a correction Via OS CD.
There has been people who have tried to write viruses for the mac. They have been trying for over 20 years. So to that end Macs have a HUGE advantage.

Una · 12 Jan 2007 at 22:38

Mr_White said:
The reason Macs don't get viruses is not because there are not enough people that use them or hackers aren't interested, or any of that crap.

It's the infrastructure of the filesystem that keeps them safe from viruses. For each file there is a Check file that ensures the integrity of the file. A virus isnt able to incorperate itself in the check file and thus any file that were to get infected would be corrected. or request a correction Via OS CD.
There has been people who have tried to write viruses for the mac. They have been trying for over 20 years. So to that end Macs have a HUGE advantage.

Heh yeah sure....... its not like crc/hash checks are hard to circumvent. I don't know exactly how this works on mac since I have not really looked at it yet but I assume its like tripwire... Also you can have memory resident only virus's which file system checks won't pick up at all.

So what about this virus? (Yeah I know its patched now)
http://www.digitalmunition.com/InqTanaThroughTheEyes.txt

Not to mention dmg files are seem a pretty flawed concept to me.
1. Users can mount arbitary file systems streams which expose low-level kernel interfaces.
2. Dmg image decides where to load to the stream before validating it...
3. ****ing ancient legacy code - (UFS)

Beepcake · 12 Jan 2007 at 22:51

NathanE said:
I'm quite fond of Mac's too but until they get a worthwhile development platform that I'm interested in (read: .NET) I won't be buying one. (So by that logic I should be buying one in about 6-8 months ) I'm sure that rings the same for most of the world's developers too. C++ is becoming too tiresome to develop GUI-based applications with. Java and .NET especially have spoilt us.

XCode/Cocoa isn't all that bad. The GUI editor is quite ok, and linking it all together is pretty simple for most things, which leaves you to spend your time actually writing the application code