Gates: Windows 'by far the most secure' system' 




"As the latest mass-mailing worm spread across the Internet on Monday ( Macintosh unaffected ), infecting many tens of thousands of Windows PCs with a program designed to attack the servers of Unix vendor SCO Group on 1 February, Gates stressed the importance of security to his company's products, but said that competing vendors -- such as SCO -- were courting danger by sitting back," Matt Loney reports for ZDNet UK.

"'A high volume system like [Windows] that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure,' Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference at London's Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. 'To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous,' said Gates, referring to operating systems that have a smaller share of the desktop market, such as Apple Mac OS and Linux," Loney reports.

MacDailyNews Take: We're tired of your lies, Mr. Gates. Are you scared of something, Bill? You sound it. Mac OS X is simply more secure than Windows and you know it. Nice try with the Mac OS X "security through obscurity" myth, but we all know the truth here, sorry. We went though all of this with the last Windows virus nightmare. As The New York Times reported back in September:

Mac OS X and Linux are much more secure than Windows XP. For example:

- Windows comes with five of its ports open; Mac OS X comes with all of them shut and locked... These ports are precisely what permitted viruses like Blaster to infiltrate millions of PCs. Microsoft says that it wonít have an opportunity to close these ports until the next version of Windows, which is a couple of years away.

- When a program tries to install itself in Mac OS X... a dialog box interrupts your work and asks you permission for that installation -- in fact, requires your account password. Windows XP goes ahead and installs it, potentially without your awareness.

- Administrator accounts in Windows (and therefore viruses that exploit it) have access to all areas of the operating system. In Mac OS X, even an administrator canít touch the files that drive the operating system itself. A Mac OS X virus (if there were such a thing) could theoretically wipe out all of your files, but wouldnít be able to access anyone else's stuff -- and couldn't touch the operating system itself.

- No Macintosh e-mail program automatically runs scripts that come attached to incoming messages, as Microsoft Outlook does.

...the conclusion is clear: Linux and Mac OS X aren't just more secure because fewer people use them. They're also much harder to crack right out of the bo



 

Posted: Wed - January 28, 2004 at 10:18 AM        

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