I realize the actual article is a few days old.. I haven’t had time to post about it.

So, one of the windows apologists over at PC Magazine wrote an article about a vulnerability in MacOSX..

And when an article starts out with”…I was happy to learn earlier this month…” its pretty obvious that any “Journalistic Integrity” the author may have had has gone right out the window.

First, here’s the article itself hosted over at ABCNews. So go read it if you haven’t already. Now, since the article provides no means of feedback to inform the author (or PC Magazine, or ABCNews) of the factual inaccuracies that are present, I think a good place to send that feedback would be to the author’s publicly listed email address available here .

So.. what I’d love to know, is how does a flaw which involves your MacOSX box being on a trusted network (Home or office LAN for example) which then has to have a un-trusted machine take over DHCP duties for the network in order to affect your machine, come anywhere close to the number of “critical flaws” found in Windoze on such a frequent basis that M$ had to switch to a monthly patch release schedule to try and make it easier for their users to update regularly?

I mean think about it… if someone has access to your network in order to add a un-trusted DHCP server…you’ve got a lot more security concerns than what might happen if someone were to take advantage of this flaw (which is really just a over user-friendly feature designed to make it easier to set up and integrate networks… see this Apple kbase article on the work around)

And of course, like almost all Windoze apologists he uses the whole “There are no viruses for Macs because its such a small market”… Right, how about there are no viruses/worms/trojans for Macs (Of course..this statement excludes Microsoft Word Macro viruses) because OSX is built on a unix kernal, which has been around for years, and is constantly being updated to avoid huge security holes you can drive a Mack truck through (Internet explorer?) And because the Mac OS ships with all remote connection services (FTP, SSL, Web serving, File sharing, etc..) turned OFF, which requires a user who wants to use one of those services to TURN IT ON! as opposed to the Microsoft way of leaving the door wide open (all services turned on by default) with a big “No Security Here” sign hanging in the window…