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Rant on MOAB
By Paul Venezia | March 26, 2007, 8:43 pm
Sorry, I have to do this.
The FUD surrounding security issues with the Mac has recently gone plaid. It was MOAB (Month of Apple Bugs) in January, followed by a seemingly constant stream of Windows folks pointing at that site and screaming “SEE?!”.
Sorry. It’s mostly bullshit.
First, the MOAB project should have been named “Month of Bugs related to OS X, including non-bundled and third-party software, some of which was written by Microsoft”. Secondly, most of the security issues found in OS X were local exploits, not remote exploits. To the unwashed, this means that they were only security threats if the user was already logged into the system — essentially meaning that they were sitting at the keyboard. Honestly, if there’s someone sitting at your Macbook with the skills necessary to exploit these holes, you have much more to worry about. Hell, skip the security holes and just boot the thing as a FireWire target, mount the drive and have your way with it. Of course, you could always use the built-in disk encryption (including encrypted swap) if you’re worried about that.
But c’mon. Security holes in VLC, Transmit and OmniWeb are included? Flip4Mac? Bullshit.
I’d like to see this done with Windows XP, including all possible third-party apps. It wouldn’t be a month’s worth, though. We’re talking eons here.
Topics: Desktops, WTF?, Apple, OSes |
3 Responses to “Rant on MOAB”
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March 27th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
OK well…considering that 95% of us normal people use PCs…isn’t the typical hacker going to spend all his time cracking the Windows OS? Bascially, what Apple users did with the MOAB is what normal hackers do with Windows ALL THE TIME!!!
Maybe Mac isn’t as impervious as you Mac-worshipers claim.
April 9th, 2007 at 6:33 am
[…] clamoring that Macs aren’t a target due to the lower market share are full of shit. I ranted on MOAB two weeks ago, pointing out that most of their bugs were either local exploits or issues within […]
April 10th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
[…] alegam que o Mac não é um alvo devido à sua baixa participação no mercado. Há duas semanas escrevi crítica contra o ‘Mês dos Bugs da Apple‘ denunciando o fato de que a maioria dos bugs […]