The Macalope

The Macalope receives the InfoWorld Daily email and today’s Quote of the Day was:

Surprise, Microsoft Windows is no worse than most other popular platforms in terms of the number of vulnerabilities. Numbers alone never tell the whole story, but you can’t read the figures and come away feeling that the Mac OS X or Linux is somehow doing a better job.

Indeed, numbers alone don’t tell the whole story and, ironically, neither does InfoWorld’s security blogger Roger Grimes.  He does admit the following about the source of the information:

Jeff Jones, of course, is a Microsoft employee. But he compiled his figures from the commonly respected, vender neutral, CVE list.

Hmm.  OK.  That’s fine.  And, actually, Jones’ post is a fairly neutral, sober look at the numbers.

But let’s look at his conclusion:

Within the platform space, both Mac OS and the Linux kernel are experiencing a general multi-year trend of higher numbers of vulnerability disclosures, while both Windows and Unix systems have generally trended downward during that time period.  However, in the most recent year, Windows and the Linux kernel contributed relatively less than last year, while Mac OS and Unix contributed relatively more.

Hmm.  Hmm.  Now why might that be?  Hmm.  Hmm.

Hmmmmmmmmm…

Could the fact that Microsoft has not substantially updated Windows for five fricking years have anything to do with it?

It should be rather unsurprising that an operating system which has only been updated with patches and bug fixes for five years would be more secure than one that’s been updated with new features every year.

The Macalope does believe that Microsoft is taking security more seriously than Apple currently is.  But that’s probably because Microsoft has such a huge security problem.  And it remains to be seen whether Vista’s solution to security – throw up a dialog box every time the user tries to do something – is really workable.  So, let’s look at those number in another year.

Grimes, meanwhile, rushes to a conclusion of his own which is wholly unsupportable:

If you want true security, use OpenBSD, otherwise what you use is going to have a fair amount of publicly announced exploits on a regular basis.

Uh, well, actually, Rog, there’s “a fair amount” and then there’s “next to none.”  Here on the planet Earth, you can count the number of OS X exploits on one hand (currently, at least).  Perhaps the 100-fingered creatures that inhabit Glaxxor 6 in the Arcturus Nebula can count the number of Windows exploits on one hand, but that’s not really a fair comparison, is it?

Vulnerabilities != exploits.

But the Macalope expects Grimes knows that.

Hadley Stern of Apple Matters declares Vista good enough for most users, which strikes the Macalope as not particularly surprising since most users are already using Windows.

But Stern believes the operating system race is over. And the Internet has won!

What this means for Apple is that the edge with OS X will disappear. And what is left? Better hardware? Perhaps. More software selection? Certainly not. The so-called advantages of a closed hardware/software platform? Most assuredly not as iTunes availability and success on the Windows platform shows.

Not having to go through the technological equivalent of a proctologic exam when registering your products?  Maybe.  An operating system that doesn’t throw up a thousand modal warning screens every time you try to do something because that’s the only way they could think of to fix their security problem – by making everything so difficult that you don’t even want to use it anymore?  Mmm, could be.

Etc. Etc.

Stern seems to believe that the development of operating systems will cease after Vista is released and seems to not know about this “Leopard” of which we speak.

All signs in the future point to the end of the importance of the operating system. Or, maybe it is time for Apple to start thinking about what needs to come next.

Phew.  All the pedanticism of Jef Raskin without any of the vision.

This is a familiar refrain from Stern – having recently argued that because most anyone would choose a Windows machine with an Internet connection over a Mac without one, the operating system doesn’t matter anymore.  The Macalope is loath to get into this because it leads to endless analogies and absurd desert island scenarios, but this is the beat the Macalope chose so it’s a little late to complain about it now.

Reduced to their most basic purpose, operating systems are tools you use to accomplish something.  When given the choice between accomplishing that thing and not accomplishing that thing, it should prove unsurprising that 99 out of 10 [sic] users are going to choose to accomplish that thing.

They are also likely to choose to not get stuffed in a duffle bag full of angry bees and beaten with sticks.  Again, not surprising.

Stern wants to pretend that this is something new.  It is not.  This is the way it has been since tools were first invented.  If you could have asked an australopithecus if he’d prefer a large bone to beat a boar to death with or a leafy frond, he’d have knocked you over, taken the bone and beaten both you and the boar to death with it.  So, yes, the Macalope will happily stipulate the point that between a tool that gets the job done and one that doesn’t, the one that does is more useful.

Yippee.

This says nothing about how quickly and efficiently the job gets done, or how fricking awesome you look doing it.

Perhaps it’s that Microsoft has been out of the fight for five years that’s causing Stern to believe we’ll reach the end of history when Vista is released.  But here in 2006, we’re still years away from an “always on” zero-latency Internet with applications that don’t look like “teh azz”.

So let’s not pretend otherwise.