Malware detection coming in Snow Leopard?

Wrong step. This is like a invite to some virus coders.

Every lock has been broken in the past and it wont take too long and this will be too. Maybe i am wrong, but after 3 years Mac i still have my paranoia coming from 10 years Windows - and i've seen all good attempts fail.

And once it's broken this built-in feature is as good as nothing. Why is Apple entering that "contest" at all? Because of the handful trojans circulating in the depths of pirated software hell only.. i don't think so.

Anyway.. Just saying you shouldn't think you're saver now. As always, you will hear that your computer is probably compromised when it's on the news. ;-)

Nice step! Nifty feature.

If true, this is interesting and a good step in the right direction. Does this mean Apple will pull the ads railing on malware on the PC, including the ones they just released? Or are they going to say, "we have fewer, so it's ok"?

i find this rather hilarious with the current apple ads propagating the serene mac existence. honestly, I think they are pissing off some virus-writers with those, who might just jump on apple software and write a few nasty programs...

It also throws out warnings about websites. I have gotten three of them so far.

I don't understand how anyone could conceive this as a bad thing. More people buy Macs and hackers will no doubt start targeting the platform. Glad to see Apple's ad campaign hasn't gotten completely to their heads.

"The Register notes that the filter appears to only catch files downloaded through some of the more common apps (Mail.app, Entourage, Safari, Firefox and iChat among them) but not files copied over from removable media."

Well, if all computers involved in such a situation were Macs running Snow Leopard, so long as neither user opted to open the infected disk image and install the malware, they would be fine.

"It doesn't cover the wider gamut of threats out there, nor would it detect or block Windows malware that a Mac user could unwittingly transmit"

What would this 'wider gamut of threats [to Mac users] out there' entail?

Also, I don't think it's Apple's responsibility to tackle Windows' malware infestation. That would be quite a difficult, painstaking task that's Microsoft's to handle.

Nonetheless, this sounds like a great thing to implement on an OS level, rather than leaving it up to users.

This is the type of thing that has to be built into the OS to be effective and easy to use. If Microsoft had done this 10 years ago I suspect the Windows malware market would have never emerged. There just wouldn't be enough good targets to grow the market so quickly. Apple should back port this to 10.5 and maybe even 10.4 to cover all their bases. It's probably just a simple checksum/hash check.

If, as viruses/trojans/malware/spyware become more prevalent on the Mac, Apple stays on top of the game by protecting its users (who, might I add, pay them oodles of ca$h), then I seriously would think that despite aforementioned crud, Apple is STILL the way to go as far as computers are concerned.