Thursday, October 25, 2007

TidBITS Safe Computing: How Leopard Will Improve Your Security

Any article that starts with this paragraph is bound to get a lot of attention from the Security community:
"With the release last week of the feature list for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the security world is buzzing about some extremely important updates that should, if they work as expected, significantly improve Mac security and will make me less nervous about connecting to wireless networks in Internet cafes."
The big ticket security features mentioned in the article are:
  • Address Space Layout Randomization

  • Time Machine a la Backup and Restore

  • Application Sandboxing

  • Firewall Improvements

  • Application Signing

  • Guest Account that purges itself

Turns out that most all these features already exist in Vista, and though people on the web can claim that the Windows implementation isn't perfect, thanks to the SDL and the Windows Security Team, Windows is the pioneer when it comes to security technologies available in Consumer Operating Systems. The fact that there is no mention of the existence of all these features in Vista points to a double standard in the Technology Press. No one is calling out the fact that Apple has copied Microsoft, which is just egregious.

This round definitely goes to Vista.

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