Filed under: Security
BBC: Teach our kids about safe Mac computing
It's the end of innocence, according to the BBC, the time when you'll have to sit down your children and tell them about the birds, the bees, and the recent Mac Trojan (no, not that kind of Trojan) security compromises. There's little new or ground breaking in the BBC article but their adherence to the Safe-Sex/Safe-Computing paradigm is pretty hilarious. We all knew that as the Mac became more popular as a platform that it would start to be attacked more regularly and last week's exploits confirms this new reality.
On the one hand, a wider installation base means better software and easier repairs. On the other hand, Mac OS X security becomes a bigger and bigger target.
Thanks to Steve Barnett
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
max Walker said 3:55PM on 11-07-2007
Another 'look Mac's have problems' article from a usual BBC suspect.
If your kids are surfing dodgy websites and they have administrator permissions to install so called 'java scripts" then dads get what's coming - but this isn't new - the same was true of all previous versions of OS 10. It's just a cheap article that he knows the M$ iPlayer centric Beeb will publish.
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Christopher said 3:58PM on 11-07-2007
It's a shame the guy doesn't have any idea about how QuickTime works, and the differences between Flash Video and video played through QuickTime.
YouTube and Flixter both re-encode video on the way in - so even a trojan designed to attack through vulnerabilities in the Flash Player (Adobe's problem) would not survive.
No, this cannot propagate, either. It has to be deliberately uploaded.
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Chris E boy said 4:07PM on 11-07-2007
Bill Thompson is the British Rob Enderle. All of his articles are full of over-sensatonalism. The guy gets n my nerves.
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Lorand said 4:06PM on 11-07-2007
Here's an idea: Don't give your kids the admin password.
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Robert Mohns said 4:10PM on 11-07-2007
Guys, if you're going to use stock photos from iStockPhoto, PAY THE THREE BUCKS. Don't steal it.
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Mo said 4:11PM on 11-07-2007
As I wrote on my blog yesterday: this is sheer scaremongering. Bill Thompson seems more worried about kids getting infected by a trojan than he is about them looking at the porn sites which are the only source of it.
The mentions of YouTube and Flixster in this context are just downright dishonest, as they're Flash-based, and if he's so concerned about his little boy's welfare, why does his son have the admin password!?
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Potuz said 4:27PM on 11-07-2007
I wouldn't call "exploits" as in the main article, given that there's no particular flaw in the OS nor on software that this Trojan exploits, rather the stupidity of the user.
P
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Jcm said 5:58PM on 11-07-2007
First time poster and I'm doing it to slap the wrist of the author and agree with Robert. You guys are illegally using a photo from istockphoto.com. Come on, an image that size costs like $1.10 to LEGALLY use.
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Dan said 6:38PM on 11-07-2007
We often use the free version in the comps and pay for it when we decide it's the image we actually want to use. I'm assuming that's what happened here. Right?
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JP said 7:26PM on 11-07-2007
I'm with Robert and JCM. For a blog that makes this much money, it's downright wrong to get away with stealing stock photography. Remember, Mac people are often creatives, and we dislike you stealing from one of our own.
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Jt Hollister said 8:51PM on 11-07-2007
Ridiculous. One piece of malware is released for Mac and everyone goes crazy. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn't even be considered malware if something similar existed for Windows...when you VOLUNTARILY run a harmful script, it's your own fucking stupidity.
Macs are [currently] completely clean for the average home user. It's going to stay that way. The fact that there is little to no malware on Macs is not a result of the low market share. If that were the case, then the 5% Mac market share should have equated to 5% of the world's viruses, but this was never even close to the case.
You can call me a Mac Fanboy/Worshipper all you want, but the fact remains, Macs are fucking secure.
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Brady said 2:45AM on 11-08-2007
I love that you chose a picture of Tommy Trojan - he's smack dab in the middle of USC's Univeristy Park Campus. Fight on!
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NicBroomfield said 7:43PM on 11-11-2007
I read the article, and I agree with Thompson's view.
The existence of this trojan indicates the interest of the black hats toward the Mac platform. We have yet to see whether they will succeed in getting a worm past the Mac's security, but there is no doubt that they will be trying.
The trojan appeared on porn sites, but also got hacked into social networking sites. Thompson's son is into YouTube and flixter. So he may also by implication be looking for video on another site which uses QT, and potentially hosts the trojan.
Thompson may have posted some dubious stuff in the past, but here he takes a jab at micro$oft and urges UK schools to get beyond teaching Word and Powerpoint, and savvy up the kids to the responsibilities of using the internet. In the past, that advice would have benefitted Windows users more, but now the benefit might be cross-platform.
So what's wrong with that?
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