Mossberg: Dump your Windows machine and get an Apple Macintosh to free yourself of spyware

“How can you get rid of spyware and how can you avoid it in the first place? One nearly surefire cure is to dump your Windows machine and buy an Apple Macintosh. Almost all spyware is written to run on Windows, and it simply doesn’t work on a Mac, even if it gets downloaded to one,’ Walt Mossberg writes for The Mossberg Report.

“It’s possible to write spyware for a Mac and install it on a Mac, but there’s little incentive to do so because of the Mac’s small market share. Also, the renegade programmers who concoct spyware rarely are expert in writing Mac programs. Those same factors have spared the Mac from any serious virus attacks. So if you owned a Mac, you’d likely be spyware-free,” Mossberg writes.

Full article here.

For information on smoothly adding a Mac OS X machine to your computing arsenal, please click here.

18 Comments

  1. Small market share is responsible for the lack of Spyware? Hmmm, I don’t think so. Perhaps it’s because OS X is robust, and spyware has nowhere to hide. Can it install into /System? No, not unless you enter your password (which you are highly unlikely to do). Can it install into /Library? No, for the same reason above. Can it install into /Users/youraccount? It could, but what can it do from inside there?

    And they’re the only places that Spyware can possible hide. So the fact that Apple has a small market share has nothing to do with the fact that Spyware doesn’t exist.

    More likely, the fact that Windows is a piece of shit and has a ‘Registry’ that allows anything to install anywhere. No admin protection at all? Yes, another reason.

    Blimey, when are people gonna wake up and ditch Microshit?

  2. How many of you get the gut feeling that part of the G5’s IBM chip problem has to do with Microsoft’s Xbox demand for the chips…???? I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s money bein exchanged under the table or some obscure clause in the MS/IBM contract that gives M$ priority shipments.

    Only those who already know the value of a Mac are going to have the patience to wait for them.

  3. Bart

    I don’t know of any Mac users that hang out on MS news sites, yet there seems to be lots of Windows users that hang out here. If you are not somehow “affected” by the Mac and it’s users you wouldn’t give a crap or choose to join in the dialog the way you have. What is it, fear, lust, envy, spite, I really would like to know.

  4. I’m tired of these “Look, Windows bad, Apple good.” posts.

    I think most people got the point about 4 years ago. For those who haven’t come to a similar conclusion, well, they’re probably hopleless, clueless, and/or biased.

    Please, stop the MS bashing till Longhorn is made commercially available, then Apple can give MS the coup de grace. These recycled posts are getting redundant and boring. Kinda like Kerry’s and his flip-flops.

  5. The Mac is no more secure from spyware than Windows is technically. Nor is linux. Spyware is usually installed along with another application the user installs. Most spyware comes bundled with downloadable software. The only sure way around this is to download open source software only. I refuse to install any “shareware”. Open source only.

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.