New Get a Mac ad: Security

To Mr. Richard H.: Frequent popping of password requests are unusual in Mac OS X, and suggests there may be a setup problem. My son was seeing password requests pop up using Safari. Turned out the Keychain on his account was corrupt, and needed to be discarded. Also, if you are not an admin on the machine you will get prompted for password permission when moving files in and out of areas like the Applications folder. However, I have set up a number of macs and it is rather uncommon for any of my machines to require username/password entries.

Is that Ryan Stiles from Whose Line Is it Anyway?
as the security guy?

Vista is WAY worse. It's comical how they think that is an acceptable security fix.

Best Mac ad so far. It's fantastic.

How about a vote on banning Eric from posting? His idiotic rantings are getting old.

Save your juvenile nonsense for the LAN party, lamer.

I guess this is what we'll have to learn to live with if the Switcher campaign continues to grow...

For those of you who insist that the OS X security is the same as Vista security, you haven't actually used both operating systems, or you are pathologically unable to find fault in Microsoft products.

Let me spell it out concisely: The UAC on Vista is more annoying AND less secure than the security features of both OS X and Linux. In fact probably all Unix flavors have the same security features, but I haven't used them all.

Here's why:

If you are an admin user, the UAC doesn't ask for your password, it simply assumes that whoever is at the mouse is the Admin. That's a very bad assumption, and will cause grief in many corporate environments.

Worse, the UAC pops up a security alert so often that the average user (the ones we want to protect) WILL become numb to the silly thing and simply click OK to get rid of the annoyance. I remember one case in RC1 where an Icon was created on the users Desktop during Vista installation that was created by the admin process, so deleting it from the desktop actually required an approval.

Vista's UAC promotes bad behaviour because it is so annoying.

The way all of this is done in most *nix type systems (including OS X) is to always ask for Admin password, and then grant access for five to ten minutes. This allows the user to perform a variety of system housekeeping commands before the password is requested again. This is a much more sane process that promotes better security while being much, much less annoying than Vista's UAC.

So how can you say more annoying AND less secure is as good or better than OS X?

The complaints people have are:

1. that its not always clear what the prompts are for;
2. that there seem to be rather a lot;
3. that (on an admin account, which is what most Windows users use) you don't authenticate; you merely approve;
4. that you also get locked out till you click.

Number (3) is a good one. Imagine, for example, if someone steps out the room withouit logging out and his kid clicks "yes".

Number (4) doesn't happen on OS X: you can be doing more than one task at once and, after you trigger the authentication dialog, you can do something else and then come back to it. Not on Windows.

(Similar lock-outs happen, and have always happened, with Windows in other situations - sometimes one wonders if it really can be said to allow people to multi-task in any very real sense.)

All in all, Vista UAC, is quite an inconvenience but doesn't offer the protection it should. It's just bad design. And as PC observes right at the end of the sketch, you could switch it off but that's a really bad idea.

IOW, you're "damned if you do and damned if you don't".

A very pointed and very funny sketch.

FIRST mac commercial I actually agree on.



The damn security thing annoys the hell out of me! If I werent so lazy I would uninstall Vista right now and go back to XP...

with my experience of using Vista, the whole "security" pop-ups were a joke, they never even asked for a password. how secure is it when all a non-authorised user has to do is hit enter? ....... not freakin' very. vista is about as secure as a wet tea bag.

The new Japanese commercials are a hoot as well. Didn't see one for Vista, but the Spyware protection one was pretty good. http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/