Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Beta of the day: QuickSilver β24 has been out for a while, but I missed it. The download is buried in their forums in accordance with QS’s current “drive potential users away” policy.
Statistic of the day: Infected Windows PCs Now Source Of 80% Of Spam (from Slashdot)

Daring Fireball reports that the latest Security Update (2004-06-07) closes the Mac hole completely. There goes our big vulnerability, and it never even got exploited. I’ll be keeping RCDefaultApp around for its handy file-type handling, but the days of running a real, leaky, hack-me-hard OS are over for my mac.

Just a few days back, Daring Fireball blogged an interesting “broken windows” theory of PC viruses and spyware:

My answer to question posed earlier — why are Windows users besieged with security exploits, while Mac users suffer none? — is that Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances. Many Windows users are simply resigned to the fact that their computers contain software that is not under their control. And if they’ll tolerate an annoying application that badgers them with pop-up ads, well, why not a spyware virus that logs every key you type, then sends them back to the creator? (That’s a real virus, by the way, Korgo, which hit Windows at the end of May and is spreading quickly.)

The Mac is like a good neighborhood, where the streets are clean and the crime rate low. You don’t need bars on your windows in a good neighborhood; you don’t need anti-virus software on the Mac.

I think the issue is even more basic than adware leading to viruses in the way that one broken window leads to many broken windows. If I were to make the broken window analogy, it would be the broken windows sold by Microsoft that lead to both adware and viruses. If you expect the OS to behave erratically - chewing up your files, popping up mysterious error messages, crashing, and requiring frequent reinstalls for no adequately explained reason - then you already have the bad neighborhood that makes adware and viruses seem natural. You didn’t watch your lovely block going bad as the crack-ho’s moved in - no, you bought a fixer-upper in the ‘hood with your eyes wide open.

That is to say, you tolerated the broken windows by paying Microsoft for them in the first place. Mac users demand a functional OS not by our postulated eternal vigilance (of which there’s neither need nor evidence) against spyware, but by buying a functional OS in the first place. We’ve moved out to the ‘burbs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2004 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.