Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Dec 2007 21:42 UTC
It's the time of year again, folks. "The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I've compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and placed them side by side. This is significant because it shows a trend that can give us a good estimate for how many flaws we can expect to find in the coming months." Do with it as you please.
Thread beginning with comment 292727
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-06
You seem to be the one being "intellectually dishonest" here. Replying to something one feels to be not entirely correct does not make one a "fanboy". If that were the case then everyone quick to reply to a negative comment about Vista would be a Vista fanboy.
I also use a Mac and I do reply to a number of assertions that I feel are not justified about Macs. I suppose you will call me a fanboy, but that does not make it the truth. I do like my mac, but I also like my other computer running BSD and Linux. This is being posted via my BSD installation. I spend a lot of time using it.
Anyway, to get to the point, while the article does provide some interesting statistics it only provides part of the information needed to determine how secure an OS really is. If you remember MS recently came out with a study that they said proved IE was more secure than Firefox. http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/99955 They used the same metric to make that claim, the number of reported vulnerabilities. But interestingly, when you looked at the time that critical vulnerabilities went unpatched IE was not even close to being as secure as Firefox.
What we now need is the same information about the OS vulnerabilities. How long was each OS in an insecure state from the critical vulnerabilities and were there any exploits in the wild during this time? People believe what they want regardless of the facts. You will probably dismiss me as a fanboy for that very reason. All I can say is that it has been my experience that security on a Windows machine has been more of a problem than it has been on any other OS I have used in recent years.