Get some air

Its about time for Ryan Naraine to pull his head out of his orifice and stop spouting the brown stuff that helps the Apple trees flower early.

Asinine Ryan writes that:

"Apple’s marketing department gets a kick out of kicking sand in Microsoft’s eye on security but, truth be told, Apple has a long way to go to match Redmond’s seriousness around security."

What bollocks, and ugly hairy ones at that. As far as I can see there is a whole world of difference between writing software that is secure and being so used to producing a flawed operating system and applications that you have become expert at releasing fixes for your patches.

Naraine goes on to list five recommendations that spring to his mind. Considering the proximity of his head and his arse, its no wonder that these are all total crap.

He cites that Apple is in the unheard of Threatcode Hall of Shame, but fails to inform that Microsoft features in that site's bad books nearly three times as much as Apple does.

I'd much rather have Apple have security concerns permeate everything they do and be in the forefront of the minds of engineers who work to improve OS X everyday instead of think it is the domain of one special employee.

The real reason Naraine is sore at Apple lurks right at the end of his diatribe where he whines about not being given the time of day by Apple PR. If I was in Lynn Fox's shoes, I wouldn't waste any time on this hack either.

Since the latest update of OS X to version 10.4.9, my Mac feels doubly impregnable to attack and hardly a peep can be heard from the crows down by the south paddock fence.

Far from validating the methods of the loser Moabites, Apple has shown their approach to be entirely without merit. They have needlessly endangered the security of many Mac users in their selfish quest for celebrity.

I'm going to need a brace of barrels stacked next to my perch for emergency use.

I wish I was as eloquent

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has some great comments on the 60-second Wi-Fi Hoax. As more information comes to light it is increasingly clear that Maynor and partner are a bunch of pansy whiners. Technically adept, but whiners nonetheless, and nearly incoherent communicators to boot.

What these supposed security researchers did was akin to lobbing bricks at the windows of an abandoned factory and then informing the owners that glass was susceptible to breaking.

It is understandable that Apple responded as they did. After-all they did all the hard work in ensuring that Mac OS X remains invulnerable.

Does David Maynor really believe the stuff he writes?

It was a good thing that I'd had a couple of ciders during the Superbowl, because it turned out I really needed them after reading the bullcrap spouted by David Maynor about the Newsweek interview with Bill Gates.

You remember David Maynor, he's the guy that wanted to stick a lit cigarette into my eye. I'm not buying his latest story about being misquoted either. Who would ever believe that anyone can hate the hilarious John Hodgeman and the cutesy-pie Justin Long? Loser.

Right off the bat Maynor's on about how Vista is supposedly more secure than Tiger 10.4.8, and goes on to make a paper evaluation of the supposedly advanced new security features in Vista.

This may be a worthwhile exercise for a "security consultant", but it is something I don't really care about, particularly when on the same blog site Maynor discusses George Ou's Vista voice recognition hack, and jokes about using it to disrupt presentations at the upcoming RSA meeting.

So here's the rub, Maynor's supposedly more secure Vista is already compromised. In contrast, after a month of onslaught by Maynor's Moabite friends, there are no reports of a similar situation with OS X.

But wait, the best is yet to come: Maynor then goes on to make the point that he is not attacking the average Mac user, just the "zealots" creating a false sense of security. Now the last time I looked, there is only one version of Tiger used by both "zealots" and other users alike, so it seems to me that he is trying to stick a lit cigarette in every OS X users' eye.

And to top it off, he's doing it in a way that helps out the bad guys, not the software vendors or the users he claims he is looking out for.

The only people who gain when vendors are not given advance notice of security issues so they can patch them are those other "security researchers" busy building spam botnets and keyloggers and backdoors to steal credit card and other personal details. So I certainly don't buy Maynor's bogus "name and shame" argument.

But none of this changes the fact that OS X is invulnerable to attack. There is still no viruses (virii?) and other malware for OS X out in the wild, and that is what really counts.

Maybe Maynor should stop moaning like a ratbag little kid about how he got "pwned" when Lynn Fox called him on his bogus wi-fi hack and show that he can not only go about finding security problems, but can also fix them.

It is easy to cut down a bunch a trees, but it is a totally different prospect to grow an orchard. I know what side I'm on, does Maynor?