New Patch Fixes 43 Flaws In OS X, Many Serious 2124
One of the reasons is that OS X 10.4 does not have all the same APIs and applications that 10.0 did. For instance, some of the security flaws that have been discovered and patched were in Safari, GarageBand, and iChat. These applications did not exist in 10.0. Therefore, contrart to what you suggest, the security flaws that came with them have not been around for five years.
OS X didn't draw as much attention from anyone except Mac users and Wintrolls for a while. It's only in the past year or two that OS X seems to have appeared on everybody else's radar. Macintosh has long been dismissed as "just a toy", perhaps making it less interesting as a target for your common hacker.
snip The same applies to Windows. Though I would hazard a guess that not all problems are with the...
OS X will likely not be the vector for an internet-disabling virus or worm (as Windows was, twice IIRC) because out of the box it is (and always has been) more secure than Windows was.
Daniel Johnson said the following on 16-05-2006 11:25 am: He said, "the answer is too long to post". I found a shorter answer...
The parts of OS X that communicate with the rest of the world and those that implement the security model are OpenBSD. OpenBSD has had a lot of attention and scrutiny from the BSD community for many years, thus making it saf*er* and *more* secure than Windows. OS X inherits that security. It's not absolute, but it is demonstrably better than Windows.
Whereas it's relatively simple for a web site or an email sender to get a Windows user to download and install some CPU-cycle- and internet-bandwidth-sucking application, on OS X that would require the user to enter username and pbuttword, which would raise suspicion and likely not work.
Another reason that slimy advertisers are less likely to target OS X is that they tend to have a "winner-take-all" mentality. Because so many people use Windows, the slimevertisers are perfectly happy to throw away the entire OS X market. Slimeware for OS X is much less likely to get developed.
Saying this is no more helpful than saying it is "inherent to Mac OS X". You have not told us what Unix does (or doesn't do) that produces this result; you...
What it tells is that advocates here (whether for Mac, Windows, or Linux) don't have the technical background and impartiality to write a...
Finally, there are people at Apple whose job it is to look for and deal with security problems. OS X has an easy and convenient update system; I suspect that most OS X users run the updates regularly. They're not as frequent or bothersome as Windows updates have been, so they're more likely to get applied.
So I'm interested in the motivations behind this discussion. How do Windows supporters think Windows and OS X security compare? Is OS X better, the same, or worse? How much better or worse? Is OS X security bad enough that I should switch to Windows?
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