Read a report last night (sorry, no link, but it came from Engadget) about the first Trojan to be written for the iPhone. Apparently, it only affects Jailbroken iPhones, but that's beside the point, which is something like this:
If it's only taken this long to get malicious software written for the iPhone, then it's a sign that Apple's marketing is flawed (and I knew all this before I read the article; the article just made it strikingly clear). If you switch to Apple, then no worries about catching a nasty virus or worm or Trojan or adware. But the truth is, the reason there isn't a huge Internet overload of Mac-based malware is because its market share never really gets above 10-15%. Windows holds the vast majority of the operating system market, so, to affect the most people, you write evil-ware for Windows.
But if Apple succeeds in switching a significant portion of people away from Windows (which is becoming easier to do now that Vista's been received so generally negatively), enough to recover their market share, then that will open Mac up to all sorts of disgusting little bits of code. Mac will no longer be able to use that same old schtick of theirs to gravitate customers away from Windows.
What really scares me about all this is that Mac OS X (and probably previous versions as well) is a Unix-based operating system, just like Linux. The directory structure of Mac OS is virtually identical to the directory structure on my computer running Ubuntu 7.10. Should Mac by some chance become popular enough to begin attracting more attention to the hackers and advertisers and Internet black marketers, wouldn't this put my precious open-source OS in danger? I mean, if I were writing this kind of software, I'd make sure it infected some kind of Unix system folder like /bin or /usr/lib or /etc. Since these folders exist both here in Linux and out there on Mac, wouldn't my computer become like an unintended target for that software?
It'd be almost like friendly fire!
If it's only taken this long to get malicious software written for the iPhone, then it's a sign that Apple's marketing is flawed (and I knew all this before I read the article; the article just made it strikingly clear). If you switch to Apple, then no worries about catching a nasty virus or worm or Trojan or adware. But the truth is, the reason there isn't a huge Internet overload of Mac-based malware is because its market share never really gets above 10-15%. Windows holds the vast majority of the operating system market, so, to affect the most people, you write evil-ware for Windows.
But if Apple succeeds in switching a significant portion of people away from Windows (which is becoming easier to do now that Vista's been received so generally negatively), enough to recover their market share, then that will open Mac up to all sorts of disgusting little bits of code. Mac will no longer be able to use that same old schtick of theirs to gravitate customers away from Windows.
What really scares me about all this is that Mac OS X (and probably previous versions as well) is a Unix-based operating system, just like Linux. The directory structure of Mac OS is virtually identical to the directory structure on my computer running Ubuntu 7.10. Should Mac by some chance become popular enough to begin attracting more attention to the hackers and advertisers and Internet black marketers, wouldn't this put my precious open-source OS in danger? I mean, if I were writing this kind of software, I'd make sure it infected some kind of Unix system folder like /bin or /usr/lib or /etc. Since these folders exist both here in Linux and out there on Mac, wouldn't my computer become like an unintended target for that software?
It'd be almost like friendly fire!
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