Apple’s support page, “Mac OS: Antivirus utilities,” that the company originally published in June 2007 and updated with new versions of mentioned antivirus apps on November 21 2008, which, for some reason — incompetence, ignorance, or both — generated widespread coverage from axe-grinders worldwide has disappeared.
“‘We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate,’ Apple spokesman Bill Evans, told Macworld. ‘The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.'”
MacDailyNews Note: Neither of the original nor the updated KnowledgeBase articles (which we reprinted verbatim here) mentioned “Mac OS X.” They both stated, curiously, simply “Mac OS,” a fact we also mentioned in our article yesterday.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple couldn’t have planned a better way to call attention to the Mac’s vastly superior security (and maybe they did). Expect massive handwringing from the Windows sufferers who think everybody, even Mac users, should be wasting their processor cycles so that those suffering with Windows can be “protected” as they continue to torture themselves with bloated, insecure, upside-down and backwards, badly-faked Macs in order to delude themselves with visions of some great “deal” they got upfront.
As we said yesterday, “We’re keeping our processor cycles to ourselves. As evidenced by our ongoing poll — ‘Do you run antivirus app(s) on your Mac?’ — we’re not alone, with 91% answering ‘no.'”
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By the way, in anticipation of the appearance of the old canard that the Mac is secure via obscurity: that’s an illogical myth. Why, if obscurity means security, in April 2007 was there a virus for iPods running Linux (a few hundred devices total, at most, in all the world), but there are no viruses for the over 30 million Mac OS X computers that are currently online? Why would criminals not target the most affluent personal computer users, the tens of millions of Mac users around the world?
Uh, oh – logic is certainly not what AV software peddlers, Windows PC box assemblers, and the rest of the leeches affixed to the Windows ecosystem want people to hear. Fear is what they’re after. The sheep must be kept in the Windows pen, no matter the cost to reputations, reality, productivity, sanity, etc. Far too many have far too much invested in Microsoft Windows for them to stand idly by and let it all slip away due to a vastly superior, vastly more secure solution from Apple. But slip away it does nonetheless.
The idea that Windows’ morass of security woes exists because more people use Windows and that Macs have no security problems because fewer people use Macs, is simply not true. By design, Mac OS X is simply more secure than Windows. Period. For reference and reasons why Mac OS X is more secure than Windows, read The New York Times’ David Pogue’s mea culpa on the subject of the “Mac Security Via Obscurity” myth here.
“Security via Obscurity” is a defense mechanism for the delusional and also tool for Microsoft apologists and/or those who profit from Windows; to be used when attempting keep the sheep in the pen. 30 million Mac OS X installs is not “obscure” at all, but over seven (7+) years of Mac users surfing the Net unimpeded certainly is “secure.” Besides social engineering scams (phishing, trojans; no OS can instill common sense) the only thing by which Mac users are really affected are large swaths of compromised Windows machines slowing down the ‘Net with spam and nefarious botnet traffic targeted at exploiting even more insecure Windows boxes. Get a Mac.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
