Thomas Ptacek

Thomas Ptacek, in the middle of a weblog post titled “Five Reasons To Ignore John Gruber’s OS X Security Punditry”:

No it isn’t. Want an easy way to debunk that argument? Here you go: MacOS 9 sees a tiny fraction of the malware Windows does. But nobody seriously argues that OS 9, which doesn’t even have a secure VM system, is more secure than Windows XP.

More “stable”? No, probably not. But more “secure”? Yes. Please, Mr. Ptacek, please tell me about the exploits you would use to attack a Mac OS 9 system. Was the U.S. Army “not serious” when they moved their web server to Mac OS 9 back in 1999? I’m not saying Mac OS 9 was a good server platform; I’m not saying the cooperative memory model was even vaguely modern by 1999’s industry standards; but secure? Yes, yes it was.

As for the rest of his piece, it’s mostly blah blah blah, Gruber just writes to make Mac ‘fanatics’ happy and his opinion isn’t worth listening to on security related issues because he’s just a UI guy.

★ Tuesday, 21 November 2006