Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sun 3rd Aug 2008 15:56 UTC, submitted by netpython
Apple "Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."
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RE[5]: As we say in venezuela:
by MobyTurbo on Mon 4th Aug 2008 05:54 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: As we say in venezuela:"
MobyTurbo
Member since:
2005-07-08

Well I never sold any body parts to buy my Mac, I just bought refurbished and was content with a G4 in an Intel world. The reason I'm headed away from OS X in the near future has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with security and usability. Not that I have any government-clearance level stuff on my computer, but I'd rather not have my box even more prone to black hats than a Windows machine. Combine that with some nagging issues with the OS itself, and SELinux or OpenBSD is definitely in my future.


As far as usability goes, OS X trounces Linux, much less BSD. Security is only a weak point because Apple has been tardy on upgrades and secretive, the overall OS design is rather secure. It has all of the memory and stack-smashing prevention of a security-oriented Linux distro. It even has encrypted swap as an option, like OpenBSD.

If Apple would stop focusing on getting a new version of iTunes out and focus on pressing security updates, it would be quite a secure operating system. Besides, most of the more infamous exploits are in Safari and Quicktime; there are alternatives to Safari such as Firefox. Quicktime has alternatives such as VLC and also has been, to Apple's credit, hardened a lot by Apple recently. Quite effectively I might add, after the hardening there's been little to no exploits of it on OS X when previously it was part of the "exploit of the month" club on all platforms.

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