Bea,
The answer is NO. The safety of Mac OS X + 9 is somewhere in between.
- Part of the Mac OS 7/8/9 safety was due to the absence of certain
server processes in the OS. Such as SENDMAIL on Unix and SMTP on Windows
and numerous others.
- Part of the safety on Mac OS 7/8/9 was due to the marketshare,
resulting in virusmakers concentrating maily on Windows
- Mac OS X joins the BSD Unix world (it runs on Unix/Linux) which make it
a larger community, and it has several server processes, maybe even some
that we dont know about. In my opinion, a user workstation should have
zero / NIL server functionality onboard. It should not have any thing
that reacts on the data it receives. So no PUSH style processes.
- Because the Classic BOX contains some shared functionality with the Mac
OS X, there are ways to alter the preferences, even startup folder, and
data from the one environment into the other.
The same applies to a Mac system that has a Virtual PC running in the
bowel/belly (whats the word?).. stomache.
And with the newer INTEL processors and Windows Vista .. I was told that
there are certain 'Virtual PCs' running without us knowing, and the only
way to show their presence it by showing that some CPU time is lost.
They are Virtual processes hiding at the hardware/firmware level. Civil
Liberties people have a lot of work and they are damn necessary.
For safety, just compare it to old Postage Mail. Whenever you receive an
envelope, you want to receive data.. a letter typed, written or printed
on paper. Or maybe a cassette tape or CD containing music.
But when the data is alive... when it contains some white bacterial
powder, and little creatures that start walking around your living room,
that's the time to get worried. Congress learned that.
Or when the cassette tape or CD contains a computer program and an
"AUTORUN.INF" file as in the Windows world, that's when you open doors to
misery.
I am convinced that nearly ALL of the misery we currently have with SPAM
and viruses, is because manufacturers were primarily thinking about
themselves, rather than the users/customers.
I may sound like a fundamentalist these days when I advise all my
customers to disallow HTML in emails, but I do mean it.
Do you know that we get pricelists and quotations from distributors and
vendors, and because the pricing data in there are variables from the
vendor's database the prices are changing AFTER we received it. There
are many indecent practises, and it is so popular to run with the masses
all in the direction of Outlook Entourage etc...
People should stop thinking that virus technology is used only for things
that do straight-forward damage such as wiping a disk or making files
corrupted.
Quotations change if you read them on friday compared to monday, and I
seriously want to know if the more recent versions of Acrobat send
information back to then sender of the document or Adobe.
I am a systems administrator and we have certain ISP equipment running
across the (small) country. I see clearly that certain waves of SPAM
result out of certain application usage.
And we are tracking and analyzing to find out the relation between app
versions and certain SPAM behavior.
Marc
Bea Hopkinson wrote on 17-11-2006 23:49 * * * Start of original message
text * * *
>Marc,
>
>>Mac OS 7 or 8 or 9 with Emailer is one of safest methods of working,
>>because all mail is treated as TEXT content, en unless you define so,
>>nothing is executed or interpreted or any action taken based upon the
>>things you receive via mail.
>
> This latter explains why Mac's are said to be safer than PC's - but
>would
>this also apply to combined Systems 9+X ?
>
>Bea
>
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T h i n k d i f f e r e n t
'We've got the power to burn: CD's, DVD's and Pentiums.'
Steve Jobs, MacWorld Keynote 9-1-2001
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