Virus alert

Yet again, another unintelligble, propaganda-ridden, mac-loving post about a miscellaneous blogger...

This post brought to you by: Beatweek!

I didn't really make it through the whole article before getting myself tied up in such a way that I knew I had to write something about it...

To be fair, I want to do an eloquent series about bandwidth, ping, latency, transaction time, etc. detailing the finer points of all, in such language that people can follow along at home, and this is going to be....  kind of in the middle of all that... but that's ok.

Here's what the article got wrong; what gets to me about the misinformation of integrated systems...

Mac's don't have viruses, there are no computer viruses, there are only windows viruses.

WRONG.

dead wrong.

there are viruses for Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris... every flavor of "computing device" possible.  some systems are more susceptible than others. let's discuss a few.

many of these variants use some kind of "market", "store" or "repository" to obtain new programs.  I'll talk about Linux, but these concepts apply to the android market, iTunes store, etc.  In linux, the repository, or "Repo", contains all open-source, pre-approved (and often pre-compiled) applications that are supported by the people who made the software running on the OS. when you stick to the supported repo, you'll often get a large amount of good, working software that is completely virus free.  When you start installing programs from outside sources (in linux, you can add additional repos, on android, you can "sideload" applications, and on iPhone/iOS, if you jailbreak, you can load your own/free apps), you open yourself up to accepting programming made by someone who is not inherently trusted by the creator of your chosen OS.  To be fair, many times, this is not a problem, with a good understanding of who is providing the software and why; you can avoid any viruses or issues. - you hit problems when the software is coming from somewhere you're unsure of.

for these closed environments, risk only enters when you add software that can possibly do something you wouldn't like happening on your device.  Often, you can avoid this software with little, to no, effort.

on more open platforms like Mac's OS X and Microsoft Windows (especially windows), there are no markets to buy apps from and no "fully trusted" sources to use; you have to make the decision yourself.  Many viruses that have affected mac systems, have been snuffed out pretty quickly, and often, Apple will disavow any knowledge that such a virus exists at all, often denying it fiercely to someone who is currently infected with the virus; though the evidence is clear.  Windows makes no such claims.

So what makes Windows such a target? that's an easy answer.  Market share.

Market share is the percentage of the market currently running one system or another.  While Apple has made great strides to regain a massive amount of consumers, and the numbers of people running OS X are vastly improved over a decade ago, in comparison to how many windows systems there are, there's no competition.  a huge number of companies and corporations run windows, almost exclusively. From Servers, to workstations to mobile devices; windows is everywhere in business.  Being that I see IT from a business perspective, and I see how many people even have macs at all, nevermind use them as a primary computer system for anything or anyone, I can clearly, and honestly say, that OS X is a rare occurrence compared to windows.

When it comes down to it, Mac is selling primarily to consumers, not businesses, and frankly, if I were a virus programmer, I don't care about you. I care about big business.  Despite how much money you may THINK you have; the business you work for, works through your yearly contribution to GDP and your entire net worth, often in less than a day.  So why would I care about you, when a few hours of transactions for a large business, is more than you make in a month?  If I break into a company mainframe, or server, and I can access user data, and remotely connect to, and administrate their accounting computers, I've hit a gold mine.  Those are not mac systems, those are windows systems, with Excel and Quickbooks Enterprise. that's the information hackers and virus programmers want.

nobody cares about the few thousand you have stashed away for retirement, it's small cheese to these guys. even if the idea is to cause havoc and take down systems, there are still far more windows systems than there are macs.

Windows is targeted simply because it is everywhere. that and the constant analysis of the OS, looking for so-called "zero-day" exploits (those that were discovered today and/or too recently for anyone to know about them), that other OSes simply don't get the attention of.

I'm waiting for the day that Macs become popular enough to have a major virus outbreak, so that all these pompous, self-righteous windows-hating bloggers can stuff a sock in their "Mac's don't get viruses" mouths.

Please don't get me wrong, I don't hate macs, if you use a mac, that's nice, I'm happy for you. Please don't be all self-righteous about it. I don't hate macs, I hate the people that use them because of a perceived notion that windows is bad, then they take all the time and life they can to convince everyone else this is true. it's not.

Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone... whatever. use what you want, stick with what you like, enjoy what you're comfortable with.  These products are different for a reason, because we're not all the same.