Markus

No system is totally secure, macs are no different really. The majority of hacking is done against windows web servers and the exploits are out there and known, and from time to time patched my microsoft.

I've not had anyone hack out macintosh web-server but I'm told it's pretty robust, but a DOS attack would take it down, as it would any server.

As for hacking personal machines, again, most of those are windows, and again, there are known hacks, so people tend not to bother with macs.

If we're talking viruses, again, 90+ percent of viruses are aimed at PCs, just look at sobig, mydoom and blaster, all PC based, do **** all on a mac, apart from annoy the **** out of mac users who get tons of emails as a result of the virus (I had over 2000 virus notification emails from a particular email server, which was a result of mydoom!). The one upsetting thing is that I can be a carrier and send the virus on, as I have, accidentlaly done in the past, not good, but if you have a sever side email scanner, then the problem goes away.

There will always be zealots from both sides, it's like RS people saying scoobs are crap and vice versa.

I use and like both platforms, yes, due to macs being a minority, they are a little better in my mind as they are not hacked as much or infected by viruses, however, there are things a pc is better at, gaming for example, and there are things macs are better at, music production, typesetting (guess what I used to do ), and other design like things.

Our company has a very unique product which we are looking at coding for the PC, this I'm not looking forward too as this means that one might have to do pc support. Mac support is easy, well Mac OS 9 is, Mac OS X is harder, but PC support, eek! not really my cup o tea.

Gedi

Becuase its difficult to attack macs with email viri.
If someone did write one, even if you were logged in as root (which should be never), you'd have to save the attachment, go to the directory, possibly edit the permissions on it and then run it.
If your gonna do that, then IMO you deserve to everything you get.

As user (as everyone should be) its gonna do **** all to the system. Its all protected.

Markus

problem is, default account on mac OS X is an admin user, so they can do a bit more than a non admin user. When OS X is installed most people wont know that and so could get into trouble, but hey ho, that's where mac supprot people make thier money

Supporting OS X is a nightmare, mainly as we are having to educate users on how to use Mac OS X, and then our software, and some people have some funny ideas about how they think OS X works and start blaming our software for messing things up, when it's just the way the new Mac OS X works.

EvilKyote

I think MS and the makers of Linux /Unix could learn alot from each other if they joined forces.

From the point of view of the general user you would be able to have a system with the relative ease of use of windows, combined with a better security base provided by unix / linux. That would be interesting to see.

I think one of the main things that puts general users off linux apart from the lesser software / gaming support is that fact that it takes time to learn, can be intensive and also when updates are done the user has to recompile the kernal.

Just a thought