Tuesday, June 24, 2008

OSX has bugs. Get used to it.

Many years ago, I cut my teeth on Solaris; a year later, I started using Linux because it was free and ran on a 386 I picked up. It always amazed me how Linux fanboys heard I started on Solaris and then would presume I was anti-Linux in some fashion, dedicated solely to the use of Solaris, and they would lecture me at length about Solaris's failures and Linux's successes. Then I would run into hardcore Solaris admins who learned I ran Linux and would presume I was a F/OSS zealot that refused to use proprietary software and they would lecture me at length about Linux's failures and Solaris's successes.

Most ironically, a community once called me a troll when I disputed some fanboy's assertion about the supremacy of Linux. This, considering he was a self-declared hobbyist user and I was a sysadmin with longer professional experience than his hobbying.

Three days ago, I pointed out that Mac OSX, despite all claims to the contrary, was vulnerable to exploits just as Windows and *nix. The latest is a root privilege escalation. My point was and still is that no system is perfect and the more complex a system is, the more errors which will result. As OSX has become more popular, it has become more of a target and people are spending more time finding errors that were already there. Trying to gloss over the errors or pretend they're less important than so-and-so's failure does a disservice to everyone.

Don't bullshit yourself or me. Especially me. OSX has bugs. Get used to it. We're going to see lots more bugs revealed as people spend more time hacking on it. If you can't cope with that idea, kill yourself now.

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Saturday, June 21, 2008

Surprise! Apple applications can get exploited too.

For years I had to listen to fanboys and cultists talk about how secure Apple's operating system was and it couldn't get rooted like a Windows system (or *nix). I wonder if they have any idea that they were completely full of shit.

No one and no thing is perfect. The more complex a system is, the more bugs (errors) that are introduced. As Mac OSX became more popular, more people began to test it for holes. They're being found. Fanboys need to figure out that while OSX may be more secure than Windows, it's kind of like being a taller midget.

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