Everything, Everything

I quite like the look of the new MacBook Pro laptops (if only I could decide between the standard white or the pretty black one), I just wish they had a better resolution. The two main reasons I've never liked Apple computers are: they contain expensive proprietary components and the range of software is pretty poor. Well it seems they're slowing moving towards more generic parts, even having moved to Intel processors, and there's plenty of decent commercial and open source software (and you can compile a lot of open source code with gcc - that you can download from Apple for free). The main reason for liking the Apple Mac was its "better security" due to its unix background. Sadly, as Microsoft have gotten better, focus is shifting towards Linux and Unix. Sure, Microsoft gets the odd bug in Windows, but you can also find the odd bug in Sendmail or X. Viruses are not only appearing on Linux to infect other Linux PCs, you can now find cross-platform versions that will infect Windows and Linux machines. And even the good old Apple Mac and it's nice looking OS X interface isn't much better, the recent Security Update 2006-003 fixes a stunning 43 flaws. It references 31 CVEs for a wide range of applications and OS compontents, from Safari and Mail to AppKit, ImageIO, CoreFoundation, Finder, and others. The security update is joined with a Quicktime 7.1 release, which fixes 12 CVEs that were previously reported for Quicktime software. One blogger's estimation of the flaws: "without the latest update, OS X is secure as long as you don't look at any movies, images, websites, zip files, flash content or email messages". As Apple's marketshare continues to grow through new Intel-based models, it is increasingly becoming a platform of curious interest to security researchers. Sadly, I'm pretty sure the attention will shift back towards Windows once Vista is released.