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Mike1951 wrote:There was a tech article in the Houston Chronicle during the past week discussing how, as the Mac's are becoming more popular, the malicious code writers are beginning to focus on Mac's also.

It should take them a while to catch up, but the threat is there.

People have been writing about this for several years now. I agree with the possibility, but I think that Mac pricing practically guarantees the brand a minority share in the home user and the average business user market places - particularly in this economy.

Liberty wrote:

jimlongley wrote: I had a friend, "had" being the operative term for the moment, who is a real Mac fanatic. Recently he forwarded me an attached file about soldiers in Iraq, and when I opened it, I noticed some excessive disk activity, and then the Spyware 2008 popups started appearing, apparently it piggybacked past my firewall in the file he sent me, and modified my registry so that one of many copies of itself loads every time I boot up. Not easy to get rid of at all, but I seem to have finally done so. I notified my erstwhile friend of what had occurred, and his response was "Well, that wouldn't happen if you had a Mac." Seems as though he doesn't feel very responsible for spreading a Trojan Horse like this, which makes me feel less like being his friend.

Mac users tend to be pretty evangelical (a lot like Glock or 1911 owners) I don't know if they have any means of checking for wintel virri

FWIW, I do run Norton AntiVirus on my Macs, but it is only because I also run Windows (for web development purposes) occasionally on both of my machines, so I feel the need to protect myself from Windows' security failings.

jimlongley, I'm sorry that incident damaged your friendship with that guy. But with all due respect, how am I supposed to react as a Mac user to the friend who sent me an infected file from his infected PC, which I pass on to another PC user without knowing it is infected because it hasn't infected my machine? You're laying the blame on the Mac user when the original offender was the PC user who sent him the infected file in the first place. If someone sneezes on a postcard before mailing it to me, and I show it to you when I come over to your house, and you catch the sender's cold even though I didn't, did I give you the cold, or did the guy who sneezed on the card? After all, if I had known that the sender was sick and had sneezed on the card, I would have certainly warned you to handle it with gloves before giving it to you to read, but more importantly, I wouldn't have brought it to your house in the first place had I known it was infected. Similarly, if I were guilty of sending you an infected file from my Mac, I wouldn't just blow it off the way your friend did because that's not right either, but neither would I expect you to hold me personally responsible for the failings of someone else's operating system. How can you hold either me, or the original PC user who sent the infected file to me, for keeping your machine virus free? When it comes to the goblins who write these virii and malware, we're kind of all in this together; but you can't really claim that if you don't exercise your responsibility to keep your machine protected too. So in my mind, it kind of cuts both ways. We all have to keep on top of our virus updates, etc., and we can't expect others to do it for us.

Liberty, yes, we are a bit evangelical about the breed. But being perfectly honest, Macs are only a little bit more secure than PCs. The real reason we don't catch Internet diseases is that we're a small enough market share that it's not worth the cretin's trouble to write malware for it. If we get too big, we will probably lose that advantage. OTH, each of us does what we can to secure ourselves. Part of my reason for choosing the Mac platform is exactly for those reasons. Whenever I say something along the lines of "he should'a bought a Mac," it's as much motivated by relief that I ducked whatever bullet is plaguing others at that moment, as it is motivated by smugness (which I really do try to resist). But in the end, I do not enjoy the misery of others, and I would prefer a world in which PC users enjoyed the same security that I enjoy.

Anyway, I apologize if I offended. It wasn't my intent.

I helped a guy in my Bible study try to recover from this same issue the other day. He is not really computer literate, and he had finally taken his laptop to the Geek Squad, who had finally done a clean install of Vista on top of the old XP. So he lost all of his files, etc. I got his email accounts set back up for him, and showed him how to find his webmail accounts, and stuff like that. I also put the bug in his ear that the next time he goes to buy a computer, he should take a long hard look at Macs. Nobody I know who is on Mac, including myself, has ever had any issues like this since we started using them. Yep. You do pay a little more for the computers; but you get a whole lot more peace of mind.