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Fanboy Quotes I

What would life be like without them? What would computing be like?


Clearwater, sharpen your pencils! No cult in the world is as rabid - or as stupid - as the Apple Maccie fanboys. Purchasing an Apple computer for that renowned OOTB - out of the box experience - is only half the joy.

Welcome online / at your neighbourhood Apple store for the 2nd half: the OOTM - out of their minds experience.

1. Brian Krebs

Washington Post security blogger Brian Krebs started a research project in 2005 to see which major OS vendor was best (and worst) at responding to security alerts. By the time 2006 rolled in Brian was at work with part three of his project: Apple. This was still before Apple started to go downhill with Oompa, Opener revisited, and the Chinese toaster scandals.

And when Brian published his results, the Maccie fanboy community collectively vomited. Here a selection of their comments.

I see your one sidedness quite offensive and would expect as much from a persaon putting down a platform that by and far anihilates Windoze by leaps and bounds. I seem to see it more and more that people are so offended by Mac being reveled as a great product. The arguments are mostly 'Maybe Apple is good - but if you look closely you will notice it can not transport or fit under your nails. Therefore Apple must be a bad product.' Apple used a blue instead of a yellow for its desktop. Horrible Apple!' I honestly belive Apple is a good product, I wish people would stop bashing on it just because they have made a couple headlines through their innovation.

This article is misleading because it doesn't differentiate between a potential security flaw and a security problem. Counting potential security flaws and time to fix them ignores the fact that Apple machines rarely have problems unlike Windows machines which are a nightmare to maintain. In fact, I have been using Macintoshes heavily since 1984 and I've never had a single security problem. It makes no sense to penalize Apple for not spending more time on things that are not a problem for them.

This article does not have a legitimate base. It sounds more like (in my own words): 'Mac may become infected, they are not as good as people think, etc...) In reality I don't care about it. All I know is that I was fed up with Windows PC's, the constant crashing, new viruses every day, pass the hot potato tech support approach, buggy hardware drivers, constant clean up and so on. I have been a Mac user for close to two years, have broadband connection, and only performed one reistallation of the OS, that was because I sold one of my Macs and did not want the buyer to have my personal data in his posession, so wiped of the drive and reloaded. I am a happy camper, honestly. This article does not make justice to Apple, the time and efforts could have been better used. As with any system, you can be tricked with an email and a link to a fake (look ilike website), give away personal information thinking you are on 'ebay' , 'paypal' or a 'Bank' and not even a Mac can save you from it. Apple have done a great job for many years, but some people in the industry have a hard time accepting it.

Henry is right on this one. Potentially, my hard drive could crash and I would lose access to all my files. Potentially, an envelope I lick to seal could have LSD on it. Potentially, my car could be hit and I could be killed by a drunk driver. Potentially, the world could end on June 6. Etc., etc. Are those risks newsworthy? Call me careless, but I'll stick with Mac security until I hear of something more imminent than what you're writing about. The past may not be a guarantee of future performance, but it certainly is an indicator.

All of this rumbling is nothing more than finger-wagging at Apple and statement of the obvious: one day OS X will eat a big one. It won't be pretty. I'm hoping I'm out of the IT business by then. But in the meantime, can the FUD. Drop the comparisons. Campaign not to chastise Apple -- they have a couple smart people in Cupertino, you know -- and do your part to educate end users about the genuine risks and the need to take it seriously. In the end, it's not about who sold the machine, it's about who bought it.

This finger-wagging bandwagon is a media stunt, and a lame one at that. So it's a white-hot topic to talk about Apple. Traffic is pretty heavy right about now huh? Clap. Clap. Clap. The enthusiasm for decrying OS X vulnerability/response time is flatly suspect. An analogy: Over the years in a far away country, fires have increasingly ravaged the landscape, burning millions of acres. It is a common topic of serious concern, and thousands of watch towers are constructed and manned in an attempt to prevent the rapid spread and rampant destruction. Meanwhile, in our own country, fires are unheard of. Occasionally a small fire is started, and several square feet are burned. Nevertheless, the climate here is more wet, thanks to the jetstream, and the fires that do spring up have a far more difficult time spreading. In fact, thanks to changes in the jetstream over the past 6 years, *no major fire has EVER broken out.* Along comes a host of itinerant journalists (new to our country) and they see an opportunity... 'we have a chart here comparing the rate of construction of watch towers...'

Does anyone else find it disturbing how many of these articles insist that OSX is where Windows was five years ago? This sounds much more like Microsoft propaganda, meant to make people think Windows is somehow so much further ahead of Apple, than they really are. I mean, articles about having to format your harddrive because spyware and malware has become so entangled with the operating system is flat out pathetic. Either way, at least the XML nature of OSX's configuration files make it much easier to CLEAN up after a potential attack than could EVER occur on Windows with its god awful proprietary and prone to error registry. Sure, you could call wolf millions of times, and inevitably you are bound to be right. Eventually some OSX machine will be compromised, but through what, Ichat, Safari? What is a mac user to do then? Obviously, as most people on Windows do, switch software. Genetic diversity in biology is the only thing keeping whole populations of species from caving to a single disease outbreak, and the same is true with computer software. Luckily, like windows users have the choice of firefox and opera, so the same is true on OSX. The OS itself leaves no ports open, and the firewall is always on in OSX, even if you choose not to block any ports by default. This means the likelihood of remote attacks is minimal at best. IPFW also offers stealth modes which Window Firewall will be lucky to have at best. Vista itself is likely to have lax firewall rules by default, because most admins would rather sacrifice security for laziness. I personally find this article to be a fluff piece because it totally neglects the fact that no OS is totally secure, but some are built on solid technology, and some actually go out of their way to make it easy to undo damage which in this case is OSX and nearly any Unix based OS. I can't say the same for windows. Maybe continuous declines in market-share and another batch of tens of thousands of malware for windows, and Microsoft will finally learn and rebuild their OS with security in mind, rather than tacked on as an after thought.

it's fun to watch everyone nitpick about whether Mac OS X is linux or unix or BSD or some combination of the three and totally ignore the point of this article. typical.

Wow! Apple was unresponsive? Down right arrogant? Try dealing with their customer support people. Any problems with their crApple laptop is the fault of the user, not design flaws covered by the extended AppleCare.

I've gotten many a cold shoulder from the consumer relations people at Apple as well; that's their largest weakness, in my opinion.

As Brian is pointing out, the security fixes for Apple can take up to 3 months from the time of discovery. I just wanted to point out that I have read year after year about how Apple is more stable than other OS's. Many have made the point that if Apple was on 90% of the desktops, that it would be hacked to death within weeks. I believe that is true. Apple's 'security' is nothing more than the fact that it's a small target for hackers and not due to superior design.

They really need to quit thinking about iPods and get with it on the software front. The company and OS are taking a well-deserved beating in the media. Yet we have the same old 'lack of interest' responses from the company about security.

Henny Penny! The sky is falling! A popular OS is vulnerable to anyone who opens up a program they didn't purposefully download. This is NEWS, I tell ya. This has never happened in the history of computing... oh, really... uh, yeah.. uh huh.. Oh, I see. Every OS is vulnerable... oh. I guess this isn't news after all. So why are you reading this??? Move along, nothing to see here...

'...here is a certain amount of arrogance in the Mac community...' wow, im amazed at some of the replies here, you sure did prove this point.

The author states facts about Apple's latency to patch security vulnerabilities in its software and you Apple polishers jump all over him. Nowhere does this article claim that Apple's OS is where Windows was 5 years ago. Nowhere does the article say Apple makes a bad product, or that Windows is better. The article simply states that it takes Apple approximately 91 days to patch its vulnerabilities. He provides you with the numbers that prove his statement. He interviewed Apple who, unwittingly and inadvertantly, proved his points to be true. You make me ashamed to be a Mac user. Grow up, will ya!

Has a virus in the wild (not a security company's test virus) ever infected OS X and caused damage to someone's data. No. Never heard of it happening. Has a trojan horse ever invaded a Mac running OS X without the users permission? No. If you consider the number of copies of OS X running every day vs. the number of malware invasions to those computers, the ratio of damaging infection/invasion per user makes OS X the safest operating system on the planet. By far.

Been a Mac user since early 1984. Never had a virus. But I think it's hubris to say Macs can't get viruses. Just because people say that, someone will devote himself to doing just that, and succeed, big-time. Couldn't we change that to 'we've been very lucky so far, and hopefully our diligence will continue to stave off attackers.' Hubris is hubris, and arrogance will fall. I'd like to think of the Mac as a great little operating system that some people believe is the best, but like all things, it has to keep earning its praise.

You Mac users are funny!

How bout this, use firefox, im sure no one will hack through there. And uses Adium or AMSN if you are scared of viruses through Ichat.

What a bunch of crock. . . the author compares Apple to Linux. . . not Apple to Microsoft. What obvious and transparent bull(). How does Apple compare with Microsot in responding to security issues? There were some anecdotal quipts suggesting that Apple was more lax than Microsloth where security was concerned but nothing you could hang a hat on. More shilling for Micro$oft... nothing to see here... move on...

First off, Kudos to BK for doing his part on reporting this story. It's humorous to see the 'replies' of some of the Mac users and their invulnerable attitude towards their OS. I'm a Windows tech professional myself, and though I think M$ has put together shoddy product after product, full of band-aids, to simply say any one OS has no security concerns simply because it hasn't happened yet is close to saying there will never be a terrorist attack on a person's home soil.

I find it quite funny that the press keeps bringing up Apple as a vulnerability. Why Apple? Out of all the OS' out there, why Mac OS X? All operating systems have security problems at different levels. However, Mac OS X has been safe for years and is still as safe as it was five years ago. Why start picking on it now? Is it because it is making the headlines more often as it rolls out brand new products every few months? Is it because there is some sort of idea out that having Windows on the new Intel Macs that the actual Mac machine is more at risk? Because if you ask me, this is just a bunch of bull. None of these assumptions are true. Mac's are much more secure for two good reasons: One, the OS is build off an open source environment (Unix) which has much lighter code then Windows making it harder to leave holes all over. Two, hackers do not develop viruses for an OS with only 6% of the computer market (same reason why software developers mostly develop software for Windows and not for Macs). P.S Mac OS X is Unix based not Linux. Although Linux is also based of Unix, there is no real comparison there. Amateur mistake.

It's humorous to see this billed as a 'story' to begin with. The story here is not about security or vulnerability. It's a shame I would need this caveat, but for the 'Mac Users Suck' anti-fan boys, Macs are as vulnerable as any *nix flavor. No, the question is, why is there an explosion of articles about this topic right now? The real story is how Apple is THE white-hot center of tech discussion right now. Apple is ubercool, and some folks are getting tired of hearing about it.

I suspect most of these articles are attempts by the cheapskates who purchase Windows PCs to try to make Macs look like overpriced anachronistic machines. I still stand by the argument that this article is an attempt at making a F5 Tornado out of dirt devil. No mac user is stupid enough to insist the OS is invincible, but how on earth can anyone say OSX is as vulnerable as Windows is? There is no way a Unix OS could ever have as many problems as Windows, because Microsoft appears to have engineered Windows with enough 'goodies' and hiding places and holes to make Windows virtually child's play to hack and compromise. Unix based OSes at least had security built in from the beginning, as ANY OS should have. Windows isn't even worthy of being ran in anything other than a virtual machine sandbox, it really can't be trusted in today's world of privacy invasion, and terrorism.

Mac OS X runs on the Darwin variant of BSD, not licensed UNIX. Amateur mistake.

It is my opinion that MS is the target of attack largely due to the number of business users involved and the kind of information that can be obtained.

The question of why tech writers are suddenly jumping all over OS X is partly because MS has taken SO long booting Vista out the door they have little new to write about concerning operating systems. And readers are sick and tired of consumer Windows malware stories and don't read them as much anymore. Additionally, many writers see a chance to stir up controversy and get some buzz, ala the John Dvorak effect. What a lot of them don't get is that it's one thing to write something controversial and quite another to be factually inaccurate. The latter will cost them.

Apple has excellent customer support. Your issues are likely your fault if they will not take the computer back.

Well as usual the MACfans are having a UNIX/LINUX/BSD conflict... Who cares.. the entire point of the article is to say that APPLE is not forthcomming with information regarding what they are actually fixing, when they are getting fixed and the actual turnaround for a security fix. OSx users be wary, times are changing.

Mac guys, stop defending against an insult unhurled. Brian was pointing out that Apple doesn't seem to be taking security very seriously, and backs it up with quantitative data. Geez, he even asks for corrections to his data. Have any of you looked at the data? Do you have corrections, or even a different interpretation of that data?

Much ado about nothing, sound a fury, signifying nothing.

I apologize for the insinuation that you have timed this article to coincide with the current media fixation. Reviewing the timeline, I see your point. Still, I stand by my main issue, that these vulnerability questions are being used to discredit Apple, when the facts simply do not provide a reasonable basis.

The argument of security through obscurity has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. The fact is that MacOS X is a more secure OS then MS Windows. That is not an artifact of it's lesser numbers, it is due to better design.

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