"Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks"
Wait, so they're phasing out Windows for security reasons, and moving to Mac instead? It at least made sense when they were moving to Linux or ChromeOS, but OS X's security track record as of late is far worse than Windows.
Mac isn't significantly more secure. In fact, after all the bad press, Microsoft has invested significant amounts of money on intrusion mitigation systems like address space randomization, non-executable stacks, and so on. Linux is playing catch up to Windows in some regards there, and from what I know about OSX, it's also far behind in intrusion mitigation techniques. (edit: here's a blog post that covers some of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michael_howard/archive/2006/05/26/ad...)
There are perfectly good reasons for switching to OSX (like, for example, the fact that the interface isn't a pain to use, and the command line doesn't suck, although I still favor Linux with a good tiling WM), but I don't think security is a valid one.
Even though Macs may be less secure than Windows, there is significantly less malware targeted at Macs, so a Mac is relatively 'safe' for an average user.
On the other hand, if you're running the server for a bank - where you expect to get constantly hit by crackers looking for an exploit - Windows would probably stand up better than a Mac.
What if most geeks today really are just buying Macs instead of building
their own overclocked Windows PCs from Newegg parts?
I can agree with the point of the article, but I wish it weren't so one-sided.
I'm using Ubuntu because it saves me from dealing with that piece of trash that is MacPorts.
I'm also (still) building my own desktops from parts because it's cheaper and I like the control in choosing the capabilities that matter to me.
But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched
to Apple laptops.
Statistics disprove this point. Maybe true in certain niches; also Windows is popular precisely because normal people want to get their job done and just won't give a shit about cool and shiny things or about superiority of architecture.
In companies I am seeing 7-year old Windows XP setups. And in companies with a good IT department, people use backups and image restores in case a computer gets affected with viruses; it worked very well thus far.
I also worked on a MacBook Pro for 2 years, and I did have to reinstall everything at some point because of hard-drive failure ... and because I was in a minority of OS X users, the internal software used for OTA backups wasn't available for me, so I had to install everything from scratch with no support from the IT department.
Using an exotic OS ... yeah, there's a dark side to that.
What a confused article, it first goes on to say that 57% of Mac uses vs 27% of windows users feel that they can use their PC safely without anti-virus, which says nothing about phishing, which is a form of social engineering requiring some minimal cooperation of the victim.
Of course it has nothing to do with the platform, so why is it surprising that Macs are 'no safer', it's the human behind the keyboard that is the problem here, not the brand of the software.
I assume that means "Since the Mac has less market share, it doesn't have as much focus on hacking it since you will be attacking a smaller slice of the pie (verses something like Windows).
"""So you can feel safe, but only because your platform is not popular enough right now, or useful enough for anybody to bother"""
That's a stupid fallacy. In the 90's the Mac had a tiny marker share, nothing like the near 10% it has today, and it still had tons of viruses. And even platforms like the Amiga and Atari had viruses, while having insignificantly less market share than PCs at the time. The OSX Macs, on the other hand, has only seen a few trojan horses and no actual virus distributed outside of some lab or something.
So, it's not just numbers or units, or relative percentage of market share. Other things count, stuff like the UNIX like permissions OS X had from the start, compared to the silly Windows 3->XP user being automatically admin.
"""Statistically? I just gave you as an example a freaking website that can do whatever the author wants on your iPhone and you're giving me statistics?"""
I'd care about that website when ACTUAL iPhones in the wild ACTUALLY VISIT websites such as this and are hacked, in large numbers.
Until then, I could care less.
It's the difference between being scared of violence in a seedy neighborhood and being scared of being targeted by a serial killer. Yeah, they do exist. What are you chances?
Remove this article, not relevant to this site and why he left OS X means nothing to anyone else or the hackers out here. I use both and love OS X, but does anyone care why?
I went to a security conference about a year ago, and not being a security guy, I was surprised to see about half the people using Windows.
This being said, I am a little sad to see the prevalence of OSX-based laptops in 'hacker spaces', partly because I don't like Apple's practices, but mostly because diversity is one of the things that makes a hacker to me; the ability to make anything turn tricks. To see a monoculture starting to emerge is a little sad.
> Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targetted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware.
Being targeted less frequently != more secure. MacOS and Safari have had plenty of critical vulnerabilities in recent years.
> macOS is preinstalled on Apple computers and Linux is available free of charge. To approve the use of Windows, GitLab would have to purchase Windows Professional licenses, as Windows Home Edition does not satisfy GitLab's security guidelines.
> As many purchases of laptops have occurred with employees making the purchases and then being reimbursed by GitLab, a remote employee would typically be making a purchase of a laptop pre-loaded with Windows Home Edition.
Come on. A PC with Windows Pro is going to be way cheaper than a comparable mac. This is just disengenuous.
> Windows Home Edition is notoriously hard to secure.
Their last point was literally about how they would force users to get Pro, why does this matter?
I'd issue a counterpoint: there is far more expertise out there in securing fleets of Windows machines, and I'll guess most corporate Windows systems are more hardened to threats than the typical developer's macbook.
The real reason to use Macs is that you get a functional unix-like environment where you don't have to constantly jump through hoops in order to work with Rails. They don't have to fabricate security reasons.
Does not discuss that fact that the dominant platform will inherently encourage malware creators to write for that platform. Implies that Mac is inherently more secure with no evidence.
This is the least relatable comment I have ever read on Hacker News. When I switched to a Mac from a Windows machine it was like switching from living in a van to living in a luxury condo. I will never go back.
"""But the Mac's becoming more of an appliance, and while it's safer, easier, and more convenient for most users, it makes it a substantially less desirable machine for me to hack on."""
You do understand that in Lion, say, nothing, absolutely nothing has been taken away from you that you could do back in 10.1 or even NeXT.
So, this "the Mac's becoming more of an appliance" is just bullshit, just blindly following the latest trend in "hacker" circles (and probably a hacker's desire to buy a new, different system to tinker with).
Wait, so they're phasing out Windows for security reasons, and moving to Mac instead? It at least made sense when they were moving to Linux or ChromeOS, but OS X's security track record as of late is far worse than Windows.
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