Does Mac Malware Benefit From Obscurity No! Proved By Data. 2473

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These figures appaer to count any sort of malware at all for the PC, but only infective viruses on the Mac. This will exagerate your results, though by no means enough to account for the whole gap.

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No; it is not sufficient to explain so large a gap, but we knew that too. The obscurity argument must be part of any credible explaination, but it cannot be the whole explaination.

We've only done that, what, a hundred times here? :D

We know this is not the case by direct examination. Do not make the mistake of arguing that, since you reject our favorite explaination, your favorite must be true. It, too, can be checked, and it doesn't hold up.

This is a little silly, but there's a grain of truth here I think: Users who do not care about computers at all use Windows, which is targetted at them. These users are especially vulnerable.

I think the different character of the userbase must also be part of the explaination.

This, too, may be so. Once you get a community of hackers going on a platform, perhaps it is self-sustaining. Perhaps the Mac has not reached the 'critical mbutt' yet.

Yet this one seems hard to verify or disprove.

This, too, is certainly true but it is hard to say how much of a difference it makes. How much do tools matter to this sort of thing?

Is this not a restatement of #1 or #4?

Anyway, you left off some of the common explanations:

6) Hackers preferentially use PCs. Hackers are not in Apple's target demographics, and they don't find Macs attractive for their own use. But then they cannot attack Macs, since they don't have Macs to develop and test on.

7) Hackers do not make their attacks at random. They choose the largest, more profitable target, and this is, near-as-dammit, always Windows.

8) Malware distribution depends on a 'network effect', almost literally. It's not enough to infect a Mac; it must be connected to other Macs or the virus can't spread. Macs are so rare that they form isolated pockets, and this makes viruses unworkable.

9) Apple targets their products to high-end, sophisticated users. These users are remarkably hard targets, since they understand their computer at least a basic level, care about it, and are paying attention.

There are lots of available explainations, and while we must dismiss some as empirically false, the others still seem adequate taken together.

I daresay lower-quality Mac acolytes will quote some of your figures, but I don't think it will help them much. In trolling, there's no subsbreastute for talent!

Expect us to point out that you cooked the books, and that even if you hadn't, obscurity still would explain a lot of the difference.

I think, as a propaganda tool, the raw numbers are more effective. You're approach involves too much calculation, and is too indirect.

The usual approach is to use exagerated raw numbers- ie, declare that the Mac is ahead 180,000 to 0. Your numbers are better than this- you are including "Clbuttic" Mac viruses along with DOS viruses, for instance.

But if you are going to cook the books, you might as well go all the way. Count every possible PC malware you can, right back to the first DOS virus, but count *nothing* on the Mac. There's *always* an excuse, after all. :D

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