CE-Oh no he didn't! Part XXIII - Gates: "security guys break the Mac every single day"
By Ryan Block 
posted February 3rd 2007 5:59PM
posted February 3rd 2007 5:59PM
Wow, um, Bill, old buddy, old pal. We're sorry to skewer you on this one and all but seriously, what the hell were you thinking telling Newsweek that "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."? We understand the few questions preceding interviewer Steven Levy's query about Vista's security compared to OS X's may have gotten you a bit riled up, but let's be honest for a second. We follow this stuff fairly closely and we haven't seen or heard about any globe-trotting worms or prominent security threats to Apple's operating system in quite some time; one of the highest risk threats we've heard about in recent memory turned out to be a hoax (although, as many readers have pointed out, there's always the MOAB). We're glad Vista is enhancing Windows security (and usability), we really are, but we really think you and Jobs (and Hodgman) should go have a few drinks and just enjoy your filthy richness or something.Love, Engadget
Remind me never to buy anything from a CompUSA in New York if this idiot is representative of their fine employee training and knowledge.
Really got your numbers mixed up, I think linux has about a 27% market share. Maybe you should rethink your posts??? As for the Bret Hart thing, did your dad ever explain to you the wrestling wasn't real.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_05/b3918001_mz001.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_jan21&link_position=link1
No wonder I never buy from CompUSA! Are you in the 5th Ave and 40th Strret store? Damn, back when I worked Computer retail (in the days of Computer Factory) computer sales people actually had to know what the Hell they were talking about. Imagine that! Now, the same same guy who flips patties at MacDonalds is qualified to sell computers at CompUSA. That's a damned shame!
Uhh, yeah, about your "just check number" statement (are you still learning english?)- is that based on 1996 market shares? Why don't you google 'mac market share' and see it is approaching 7%, yeah still small but how much has it gone up in just tha last 5 years? I will bet it is at 10% or over by 2010, judging by the amount of people I personally know who switched.
By your ratioanale, McDonalds is the best restaurant, WalMart is the coolest store, NASCAR is the best sport, and Mercedes Benz suck because they have a lot less cars out there than everyone else.
But why am I even responding to someone who actually quotes a, get this, PRO WRESTLER! HA ha ha! Wow, if your going ot be a fanboi, at least make it something worth while!
Yes, you appear to have drawn the same conclusion, if not only by blind chance, that most people with a shred of intelligence have come to; Microsoft, as you so aptly put it, CAN do what they want. Unfortunately being able to do whatever you wan't doesn't directly lend itself to doing what you need to to truly lead an industry. Cornering an ignorant market and then making stretched claims about the steadfastedness of your security vs. a company who has been made a social minority (Apple and Jobs), will bolster the support of ignorant peons who will spend thousands of dollars to upgrade their computers needlessly to simply be capable of running what? Windows Media Player, Word, AND Excel without too much processor lag?
Let's forget security for a moment; let's discuss the other massive disadvantages to Vista: You can't possibly run Vista at full capacity on your current machine, unless you recently upgraded your pc to a 64 bit processor, at least a couple gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space to harbor the 3rd party programs that most likely are having support issues with this beautiful operating system. Secondly, what does Vista look like? No one eats a veggie burger unless it looks remotely like the real thing, and the veggie burger that is Vista is haplessly trying to emulate OSX tiger...which it isn't even doing to the fullest. Moving forward, in a mere few months, Tiger (which Vista can't emulate to the fullest currently) will be replaced by Leopard, which anyone with half a brain (sadly this excludes the vast majority of brainwashed Windows PC cohorts) recognizes as far superior to the current version of Mac operating software. This new OS will also, shockingly enough, be compatible with most current Macs, as well as *guffaw* some older models! Blimey!
I was an avid pc builder and user, but lets be honest with ourselves; Bill Gates screwed Steve Jobs early on. Just recently Jobs has truly regained his savvy and gained an upperhand on Bill, and now its surfacing; Bill is a thief and the captain of a flagship that is losing face to the public. The 21st century will see the tides change towards a true visionary; Jobs and his stock options!!!
Perhaps he was referencing the month of apple bugs?
Of course macs can be haxed everyday, just keep on hacking the same dude that does not patch his windows on mac and you have a potential victim !
Thank you Windows for all those possibilities :) Hacking a mac became worth the try the day windows became available on macs.
month of apple bugs is a joke. most are bs
Once again, CEOs have proven themselves the absolute worst people to advertise their product
i guess engadg somehow found making people fighting over this topic really helps their webiste growing...3 same titles in 1 day
waiting to see another war here between windows and mac...
fight people! fight!
Can't wait until tomorrow to read the comments on this.
"I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." Sounds like ol' Bills throwin' down a challenge to me! Release the hounds!
He was referencing the month of Apple bugs.
And before anyone is like; "ZOMG most of those required third party programs or drivers ZOMG!!!"; keep in mind the vast majority of Windows exploits do also.
I thought the vast majority of Windows exploits just required Internet Explorer.
Immediately after the interview, Gates goes back to living under his rock.
I'm sorry? While Steve Jobs sits on his cash, Bill Gates is helping those not as fortunate as you or I in other countries with his. He's certainly not sitting under his rock.
I'll take ya Bill.
I also want to learn how to hack and crack ..:) someone can help me where to start?:)
Bill got all riled up, that's nonsense what he said, but he was bound to say it by the line of questioning, Also, I found this quote cute.
"We follow this stuff fairly closely and we haven't seen or heard about any prominent security threats to Apple's operating system in quite some time"
Well Ryan, that's not so much something to tout.
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20060513
=)
"Bill got all riled up, that's nonsense what he said, but he was bound to say it by the line of questioning..."
You think he's such a thin-skinned little puppy? Levy's questions were puff balls, actually.
Gates lost it--proof the Apple ads are hitting a nerve. Frankly, if anything, Hodgman's shtick is gentle satire. PCs are on average much, much worse and their users--present company excepted, of course, har har!--much more doltish. Let Gates spend an hour doing Windoze tech support if he thinks otherwise about the great unwashed using his crapware!
Poor (Rich) Bill
So, the writer of this article is not only unaware of the entire Month of Apple bugs, but also discounts the Wi-Fi hack as a fraud because they did exactly what they said they were doing, which is hacking third party driver, and then declares "what Mac hacks? I haven't heard of any!" Wow, it is the very definition of "where ignorances is bliss, 'tis folly to tread!"
i think your refering to the bluetooth hack, the one that only worked on an obscure version of 10.2, and the one that apple fixed in under a week. If someone was going to update their machine to this version, then never update it again, and also have a bluetooth enabled machine running 10.2 (bluetooth wasn't very prominent in 2002-3), then i guess you could have a security flaw.
As much as I'd like to pretend that Mac's are compromised every day they, 'sigh', they...well...sorry Bill the truth hurts
i think everyone can agree that the apple commercial references in everything is getting old and repetitive.
i for one welcome our windows (now bug free) overlords.
this should make my rating go down...
Come on guys, Windows would also be a lot more secure if it weren't for those 3rd party apps, you know, like Outlook and Internet Explorer.
Lloyd,
its not because they call it the month of bugs that they find one everyday is it?
they falsly claimed that the exploit was also with apple airport card/software, which was not true
that made the exploit a non issue as all macbooks and macbooks pro have airport cards anyway
but since you seem to know that there are countless other bugs and exploits, maybe you can help us ignorant people with some references and evidence instead of just calling names?
Bill is the founder of the windows fanboy club. What else do you expect him to say?
Eh, the truth.
Looks like someone his having a hissy fit!. Want some candy to make you feel all better, Bill?
Reality is, even if Mac indeed had one exploit (which it doesn't), that's still only one to the hundreds found on the PC.
Yes, security guys did have done it a couple of times. 14 year old students break Windows daily.
I'd say, people break (and hack) Macs for fun. Windows? you do not need to break them - they crash all by themselves for you. And one needs to hack them to make them actually working.
Back of John Hodgman, he's funny as hell. I dont know why he's doing commercials though... I guess because his face isn't really out there a great deal, and it would help him sell his hysterical book, the Area of my Expertise.
um, actually read your article before citing it. your percentage is about the number of SERVERS running linux, not desktops.
"On the desktop side, IDC sees Linux' share more than doubling, from 3% today to 6% in 2007"
I'm not sure about it breaking every day, but there have been a fair number of "proof-of-concept" announcements.
3 things I could think about bill gates.
1. Bill gates must've been too busy doing whatever he does to use a windows PC for like the last 10 years.
2. Bill gates got some next level anti virus software and a firewall which some aliens made just for him.
3. He doesnt work at microsoft.. He's lying to everyone, He think's his coffee table is a computer.
When Gates said, "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine," he was daring them to LIMIT themselves to once a month...
I think we can all learn a valuble lesson from this. That is:
When you steal a concept (i.e. GUI), you must do everything in your power to prove that you did not steal it, which may include lying. Lying some more. And then accusing others of lying and then stealing another of their concepts. And then lying some more. And then falling on your face and lying. Some more.
("Haha, virus, virus, haha, virus virus" Does anyone remember that one?)
man puts kick me sign on self and own company.
How about you go play, In the freeway..
Stick 2 the subject ass!
The best part is that just a few questions earlier, Gates blasts people who lie about stuff :p
I thought the same thing when I read that and you article. Then I thought well there is an wasy resource to check. It looks liek he wasn't that far off base Security Focus is tracking a lot of vulnerabilities in Mac Os lately. http://www.securityfocus.com/bid
Comparatively XP has slowed down a lot. Does this signal a shift in focus for hackers looking for a new playground? I would imagine that they will shift thier focuse to Vista now.
I don't like Macs, they never work the way I want them to. I like my Windows. I can customize to actually do things the way I want it do, for a lot of things, but I'm gonna say that Mr Gates went out way on a limb here. Yes, Macs had the month of bugs, but why? Just to prove it's possible. How many people actually cared to use these to turn people's lives into hell? If you'd do the same thing for Windows and no doubt it would be possible (probably even based only on Microsoft software) then people would actually take the time to read it, virus creators, especially those after your bank details would take notice, hey someone else is doing work for you and you can use it to make some dough.
Windows has a large attack surface because it is the big user base with more stupid users. That's why you have to have protection. You need to have a certain level of intelligence, another reason there are so few Mac users.
Seriously Bill, don't dare people to do this, you know your gonna have to sit your software engineers down and follow that post so they can release those patches faster than Michael Jackson cum from little boys.
Please click the link below to find out why Mr. Gates is really losing it. VERY ENLIGHTENING!!!
http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/010807/PLEX_7264.pdf
2006 Market Share
http://www.macrumors.com/2006/06/01/mac-market-share-update/
Month of Apple Bugs
http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/
A note to apple, if you build a computer for idiots, only idiots will buy them. The market share and world wide use of Windows says it all. As for security, its up to the user not the system. "I downloaded this email picture from some guy I don't know because it was in my email..."
A note to apple, if you build a computer for idiots, only idiots will buy them. The market share and world wide use of Windows says it all. As for security, its up to the user not the system. "I downloaded this email picture from some guy I don't know because it was in my email..."
so who's the real idiot??
Public bashing of a smaller company like this is obviously more motivated by Bill's ego being hurt than by anything else...windows has a ridiculous amount of market share on apple as posted earlier.
That being said:
for all of you who don't keep current on this type of stuff, a shitload of OSX exploits have been made public as of late.
Although most of them may be stupid DOS POC's, theres still ALOT of priv escalation and REMOTE code execution exploits that have really been popping up (publically) lately. I really wonder how many private ones havent gotten released/leaked yet.
@asaa: That's because of the "Month of Apple Bugs" in January. That's why you've seen them. And, frankly, when something like and exploit in VLC Player is one of those bugs (and it was a bug in the player across all the systems, not just on OS X), and there are another five third-party apps in that list, that definition of an "Apple bug" is kinda thin.
Sorry, I look at the compromised machines that are network filter lists on the campus I work at and I see no non-Windows machines on that list. We are talking dozens of compromised machines and not one is running a non-Windows OS. Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 are all on that list... but no Mac, Solaris or Linux boxes.
I wonder why?
what's even more hilarious are the people defending gates' statement. Yes, OSX has exploits, it's not perfect, but PLEASE! I don't think any person with a clue can agree with Bill's ignorant statement.
I find J.Jones security blog a interesting source of comparable statistics w/ verifiable citations (supports independent verification – do your own analysis), a breath of fresh air in an area where ideology tends to count more than facts. http://blogs.technet.com/security/
To think that apple (or any other software vendor) does a better job than MS when it comes to designing, building, testing, fielding (including end user education) and updating software one needs to believe that there's an order of magnitude difference in the quality and/or numbers of people doing this work on a particular product, and that everyone else has invested the billions that MS has on security over the last five to ten years since they became "target number 1" for the 15-minutes-of-fame team-acne. Hard to believe this is the case. If MS turns out to be a less attractive target one of these days, I fear we'll see even larger business losses due to the lack of investment and security discipline by the secondary vendors including, orcl, adbe, ibm, appl, csco, goog, etc. MS has at least demonstrated the ability to survive while under continuous attack. Will the others be so fortunate when MS becomes a less attractive target? i.e. when the ROI in compromising users of an "all ms" environment is much less than other proven vulnerable targets, like a Mac. Especially systems where they find it impossible to correct/update all shipping versions simultanously.
I can see it now.. Headlines: "MS unfair to competition, too secure, too much of a head start investing billions in secure development training, tools and practices. MS has an unfair advantage because they have cornered the market in (home-grown) security expertise in their market segment because trustworthy computing as a continuous improvement discipline is currently not taught in any school." "The European Union today demanded that MS divest itself of its security teams."