'tis old news.

Fundamental point - 50% of mac users are stupider than average. Same as Windows & Linux. You can code as hard and as high as you like, stupidity will always out-evolve you.It's not up to Apple to change it's ad copy (which, IMO, would be a futile act - do you really think people pay that much attention to ad copy anyway?), it's up to us as computer-literate users to educate our family & friends, whatever platform they choose to access digital information on. That's the only thing that will actually help over the whole population.

Oh, as for the 'imminent rise of mac rogueware', First of all.. 'rogueware'? Seriously? Malware was quite stupid a phrase enough thanks. And secondly.

Jon

I guess Apple’s instructions not to remove the software is down to legal liability. As soon as someone removes it, Apple can be held accountable for any damage or potential re-infection.

I know this is a social engineering project by the Malware folk, so technically not a virus. The best precaution is to go to Safari>Preferences, click on the General tab, switch off Open “safe” files after downloading.



And this is a good argument for closed wall systems, such as iOS - let the consumers use those where they can come to little harm. If you want the free-for-all bundle that is the world of desktop OSes, then with those freedoms come the bigger risks.

Macs were never that secure - it was just that with such a tiny proportion of users, there wasn't much point in targetting them. Now that more and more people are using Macs, there'll be more and more viruses. Soon there'll be hotfixes and weekly updates.

I've never thought that's fair to say. There have always been plenty of people who hate Macs, with Apple saying over the last decade "Macs don't get viruses", you'd have thought that one of these Mac haters would have done something really big, for nothing but the fame...But there hasn't really been anything...

Mac, Linux, UNIX, and Windows can only be so safe. If the user says "yes, do this please", the computer is going to let you do it.
Once upon a time, system changes could only be done using the root user, only a select, knowledgable, few had the root user's password. Today every user has access to pretty much everything...

As it should be! I wouldn't change something on my car unless I knew what I was doing, so why should computers be different?

People know not to play with cars, they are difficult and expensive. If Tesco did a "5 minute engine replacement" kit, everyone would be doing it...

With computers things have only gotten easier. Users know that pressing "yes", "ok", and "accept" will let them carry on happily, while pressing "no", "cancel", or "decline" will not and that's all they need to know. 99% of the time time it's fine, that game they downloaded installed easily enough and didn't do anything bad, that email from the person they didn't know just wanted to sell them viagra but they didn't want it so deleted it, but what about that anti-virus program Aunty Gene sent them? That must be safe. So they go ahead and click "yes" and "accept" and boom! Virus. It's all just point and click.
People tend not to fiddle with the innards of their computers because it's not so easy, much like performing fairly simple stuff on a car.

This needs more interaction than that. All that does unzip a package. You then have to run the package from your downloads folder, say yes to it being a download from the Internet, then enter your admin password.

Yes it is more down to stupidity of the user rather than a virus.

Apparently, it auto runs.



http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/ ... umbers.ars