Gumph

I am not interested in carrying on an OS war but I would just like to answer a couple of your points that I have been mis quoted/understood on. First what fairly skilled PC user (of ANY os) uses said os right from the box without tweaking/patching/locking it down in some way, shape or form? The reason I said out of the box is that this is the only true way to compare security issues with respective OSes. you are right any OS can be made secure with the right patches/firewall/ids mechanisms. The only way to tell if one OS is 'more secure' than another is to give them as even a playing field as possible, my interpretation of this is to evaluate each OS as sold from the respective manufactures, the vanilla release is you will. Last time I ran redhat I did a update check and had a few dozen megs of patches it suggested. I never mentioned Linux, I was just comparing Win2k and XP with Mac OS X (10.2.8 and greater) So yes, ANY os, not just win32, out of the box has flaws and exploits, its up to the end user to be somewhat educated on their platform of choice and beable to secure it. I partially agree with you on this one, yes people should have a rudimentary knowledge of what their computer can do and what pitfalls it may be susceptible to, BUT (and it is a biggie) given that most people (present company excepted) who buy a computer just want to use it to play games on, surf the net, do their texes on etc etc, they don't care about patches firewalls and all that other junk (and why should they?) then my initial statement stands OS X is more secure than win32 platforms. Cheers G

I just wanted to add my two cents onto this comment, which itself is a load of FUD. for one thing any OS X mac straight out of the box is more secure than a w2k or xp machine (again comparing like with like, the PC is straight out of the box) simply because all but the needed ports on the mac are closed whereas all the ports on the windows box are open. Straight away the attack surface of the PC is greater than the mac. Then lets add in the many more security updates that windows needs compared to macs and finally add in the fact that 99% (or thereabouts) of all virii, malware and spyware are written for the PC platform whereas the mac has approx 40 virii in TOTAL and you can see that the mac is head and shoulders more secure than the PC. I won't even begin to say what I think about the stability issues, but a sys based on BSD compared to winblows - puhleeze!!!!!