Oh noes another anti-Mac article from TIRED...

By Brian X Chen, who makes a living at it.. either that or obsessing over Digg folks calling him on it.

This is a case when the Digg comments are more interesting than his ‘articles’. Honestly, the guy wasn’t even calling out Chen except for the two instances here:

2005

“Attacks on Apple’s OS X operating system, thought by many who use the Mac to be virtually immune from hackers, are on the rise, according to a report from Symantec, an anti-virus software vendor.”—Brian X. Chen, Wired.

2006

“Mac owners’ smugness may not last forever. As Apple slowly expands its market share, it is gradually becoming a bigger target for attack.”—Brian X. Chen, Wired.

…and now you can add the 2009 article which I will not link to because it’s trash.

Maybe Chen blotted out his internship with TIRED in 2005. Maybe TIRED’s dating system is fscked. Maybe the commenter’s. Doesn’t matter, it’s just the same old crap from Chen and his buds at the anti-virus companies.

Dear BXChen:

If you, or your dubious ‘expert’ *had* a Snow Leppy’d Mac, you’d be booting it into 64-bit mode where there is ASLR (address space layout randomization) for 64-bit apps.

You would also find that MOST of the Apple apps, and quite a few of the popular ones *are* now or becoming 64-bit.

You would find that Apple has been laying the groundwork for the real attack vector to the Mac, which is trojans. Two real issues on the list and counting.

You don’t even cover the other major attack vector of OSX, that is, SSH buffer overflows or fuzzing. Which Macs seem to be very resilient to.

You would also know that Unix and Win32 are different architectures. If you want a real issue to jump on try edumacating yourself about the iPhone, the AppStore, and privacy leakage like I write about here 2-3 entries back.

But this is what comes of letting clubkids write ‘technical’ articles, and why you’re better off just staying at TIRED & leaving the real technical reportage to the hawtness that is Miss Jacqui Cheng.