Apple accidentally Approved a piece of Malware to Run on MacOS

[GamerDude]

On 8/31/2020 at 11:00 PM, pythonmegapixel said:

Hopefully this will ward off the "aPpLe'S rEsTrIcTiOn'S mEaN nO vIrUsEs" brigade, though I doubt it

Hah! They'd prolly claim that this is fake news, or something to that effect. I was talking to my brother who's an Apple fan and he was gushing about how Apple (both IOS and Mac OS) is completely safe unlike Android and Windows. Outta respect for him as he's my older brother, I kept my mouth shut, not wishing to burst his bubble.

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, GamerDude said:

Hah! They'd prolly claim that this is fake news, or something to that effect. I was talking to my brother who's an Apple fan and he was gushing about how Apple (both IOS and Mac OS) is completely safe unlike Android and Windows. Outta respect for him as he's my older brother, I kept my mouth shut, not wishing to burst his bubble.

Nothing is completely safe.  The question seems to be if and how much safer and is that safety worth the problems it causes.  As far as fake news there is still pertinent data missing. Like how often this kind of thing happens, and how fast was it caught, and how does this compare to other app stores.  One of the big things about fake news is something that is only partially true. There is a piece of information here, but only a piece.  A pretty small one. There was a piece of malware. It got by some apple designed systems. That seems to be all of it. How often does this happen? Not described.  How often does this happen to non Apple systems? Not described. It does seem to be Mac software vs iPhone software which has lower safety stuff and for which side loading is easier.  Did it take advantage of the differences between the store that does have side loading vs the store that does? Was described but I can’t tell because the explanation was too technical. So fake news? Perhaps. Certainly isn’t “this shows the iPhone store walled garden is pointless!” as some seem to be saying.

[Sandro Linux]

3 hours ago, GamerDude said:

Hah! They'd prolly claim that this is fake news, or something to that effect. I was talking to my brother who's an Apple fan and he was gushing about how Apple (both IOS and Mac OS) is completely safe unlike Android and Windows. Outta respect for him as he's my older brother, I kept my mouth shut, not wishing to burst his bubble.

It is slightly safer, If you use the App Store but on Macs most apps are downloaded from the internet.

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, GamerDude said:

Hah! They'd prolly claim that this is fake news, or something to that effect. I was talking to my brother who's an Apple fan and he was gushing about how Apple (both IOS and Mac OS) is completely safe unlike Android and Windows. Outta respect for him as he's my older brother, I kept my mouth shut, not wishing to burst his bubble.

There are fanboys on every platform that will stick their head in the sand.

 

Apple is not immune from viruses. Though one could argue their platforms are inherently safer than Android or Windows - but that's not an undisputed "fact", just something that one could reasonably argue (just like one could argue the opposite).

 

iOS and MacOS are not "completely" safe. But they're among the "more safe" platforms.

[Sandro Linux]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

There are fanboys on every platform that will stick their head in the sand.

 

Apple is not immune from viruses. Though one could argue their platforms are inherently safer than Android or Windows - but that's not an undisputed "fact", just something that one could reasonably argue (just like one could argue the opposite).

 

iOS and MacOS are not "completely" safe. But they're among the "more safe" platforms.

True

[Kisai]

On 9/3/2020 at 10:04 AM, dalekphalm said:

 

 

Personally, I think that if Apple is forced to provide some kind of alternative way to get apps on their phones, then they should provide a 100% unsupported method of installing a different OS (eg: Android) - Boot camp style.

 

The problem, ultimately, with that strategy would be drivers: who makes them? Does Apple then write drivers for Android? Or do you rely on the community to make their own?

 

 

 

Honestly, this is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect Apple to do. Not make a version of Android for iPhones, but drop a binary blob driver set for each major Android version, in case people really do want to run Android on it. That would be the most hilarious thing ever, since you'd have iPhones that run Android and can still run Android longer than any actual Android device past or present.

 

But I digress, Android is a terrible OS, and I'd rather see Tizen or Fuchsia supplant it. Android is at best described as a bunch of bad ideas cobbled together to compete in the pre-iphone smartphone era, and had to be backfilled with chewing gum to work even half as well as iOS, and is still hobbled by decisions made a over decade ago. iPhone will always be able to run circles around Android devices because of those foundations, and the incompetence of manufacturers of not being able to just run a generic build of Android.

 

Anyway, my point here was that the closed-garden style app stores and lack of side-loading by default is the safer approach, and if users don't like it, they shouldn't pick that platform in the first place.

 

I'd love to run MacOS X on whitebox computer hardware (because Apple doesn't build a machine I would buy, because they've chosen not to make low-margin machines) but I know the driver support would be terrible. At best, if Apple were forced to licence at least one other OEM to run OS X, I'd rather see a "MacOS X for OEM" version that comes on a M2 card intersposer with an install image. 

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

There are fanboys on every platform that will stick their head in the sand.

 

Apple is not immune from viruses. Though one could argue their platforms are inherently safer than Android or Windows - but that's not an undisputed "fact", just something that one could reasonably argue (just like one could argue the opposite).

 

iOS and MacOS are not "completely" safe. But they're among the "more safe" platforms.

Apple is more safe but it has little to do with the OS structure.  Structure wise it is safer than windows in a very limited way.  Android is Linux based OS X and iOS are BSD based. They both have some resistance to specifically viruses because of their file structure.  They all have the same issues with worms and other malware though. A virus is just one kind of malware.
 

What makes apple stuff (somewhat) safer:

OS X and MacOS have a certain amount of security through obscurity that windows and android don’t have. They have to be programmed for specifically in most instances, and doing that is difficult because merely learning how to is difficult.  The stuff that gets Apple users is generally social engineering stuff that is platform agnostic.  Such things attack the user rather than the hardware. There’s also the PITA of getting things onto the Apple store. Thieves don’t like to pay for things so this makes android and windows lower hanging fruit.