Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Security analysts and Windows managers often point a finger at Apple's longstanding place at the top of Secunia's OS vendor vulnerabilities list. However, that chart may map only part of the insecurity picture.

Neil MacDonald, a vice president at Gartner Research recently authored a research note on whether antivirus software is needed on Mac OS X and Linux desktops. (The answer is yes.)"

Interesting to see the competition between Apple and Microsoft moving more visibly into the area of insecurity and vulnerability. Conventional wisdom (ugh!) says that computers running OS X don't need antivirus software, and that only Windows is a malware magnet. Wrong. Vulnerability testing and white-hat hacking are showing that OS X is insecure, and that some of the security features currently in Windows (Vista and 7) are not equivalently implemented in OS X. Mac vulnerabilities are there, but, due to Windows overwhelming market share, malware writers go for the bigger target. What this tells us is that no OS is really secure. So, please, use an antivirus program! Excellent freeware for Mac OS X is Sophos Anti-virus. Get it here.

Just what did Steve Jobs teach us today? Well, initially what we learned about what the latest product to come out of Cupertino, the iPad. We learned 300,000 iPads sold on Saturday (with a total of 450,000 so far), 250,000 books downloaded on day one and as of today that total reached 600,000. We also learned that there are over 185,000 apps in the App Store with 3,500 of them specifically for the iPad. And we learned that the iPhone won the JD Power satisfaction award for 2010 making it three years in a row. They have also sold 50 million iPhones, and a combined 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches. For the iPhone OS 4.0 we learned that there are over 100 new user features, that include creating playlists, 5x digital zoom, tap to focus, home screen customizable wallpaper, file and delete mail search results and many others but Steve wanted to focus on just seven of those features.

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