Security threats Toolkit

Story: Symantec's self serving warnings

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The combined market share for OSX and Linux desktops is somewhere are 6%. Does Symantec suddenly think that either or both is going to suddenly wrest leadership from Microsoft?

Apple would dearly love to see their own market share rise to 5%, as forecast by a few analyists. The Linux people keep hoping and praying for a GUI that's never going to be competitive.

If port scanning reductions can be attributed to the recent Microsoft then I say (with teeth clenched) more power to them. I'm tired of helping friends with their Windows PCs.

But this has to be some inane idea from the mind of a PR type at Symantec which has always done respected work on viruses and assorted malware. It's little more than pure speculation. It flys in the face of Bill Gates' own admission (apology?) a few years ago to Windows users that Windows was always built with the profit motive first and foremost while anyone who knows a ^nix geek knows that safety and reliable functionality are foremost on the list of all vetted software.

Many of the reported vulnerabilities in OSX (and many other *nix OS) are often based on popular features like Apache where open source programmers are continually tweaking their code and finding their own vulnerabilities which Apple then passes on with their security updates because Apache (only an example; not picking on them as they do great work) happens to be included in both client and network versions of OSX.

What a joke. Mac software from Symantec like the famous Norton Utilities has gone downhill and is so bad anymore that they might look at fixing what they presently sell to Mac users before raising a cry about dangers to OSX.

Most "Symantec" software for the Mac (Norton Utilities, their nuisance firewall software) they bought from someone else and screwed up. Pronouncements like this only add to what little credibility they have left in the Mac community. Their Mac "anti-virus" software is coded solely for Windows viruses and worms. A friend tried to run it recently and had to force quit because it found so many (harmless) Windows bugs.

PR stunt. Duh.

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