Nasty Mac OS Trojan Making The Rounds

I'd really love to see MS do a reverse Mac vs. PC commercial right now.

Because Windows somehow became completely immune to trojans that you explicitly allow to install?

Exactly.

No, those commercials just always irritated me; especially when they made it seem that Macs were so much safer.

Yeah now their having a Big Mac Attack!!

Agreed Lev but I personally really LIKE the Apple commercials because I think they are a perfect example of agressive marketing that the PC crowd hasn't pulled off so well. For so many years we've seen commercials of totally boring, trendy or hip people doing things with PCs. What Apple has done is actually call attention to itself by saying "we're different and here's why". And then they use Microsoft's own campaign messaging of compatibility etc against them.

I personally feel that if PC folks (and I'm one of them) don't like Apple commercials, then maybe some smart PC Marketing Weasel will wake up and smell the coffee and launch some innovative PC-based campaigns that fire back at Mac. Macs are pretty compelling products right now and though I think of myself as a PC guy, I sometime second guess that because the hardware is now up to par with a PC and hey, they execute on some semi-convincing marketing too!

it was not me! that all i have to say :). ok now seriously is about darn time some show mr. jobs that his OS IS NOT PERFECT!! i will love to see him explain that...

Hey this is one of a very few Mac bugs. I have been using Mac and Windows for some time and Apple, hands down, is much more reliable than MS. OS X is certainly not perfect but I have to say from 9 years experience with OS X and over 15 years with Windows and Mac OS 9, OS X is a far superior OS, easily. But the downside with becoming more popular is you get more attention... sometimes negative attention.

 I have never used a mac so I have to ask. How old is the 10.4 and 10.5 OS for the Macs? If it's an older version hady anyone uses anymore then there is nothing to really brag about. Of course if it's a newer version then I guess there is

10.5 was released around the same time as Vista roughly and is currently the de facto OS of MAC

Lev_Astov:

I'd really love to see MS do a reverse Mac vs. PC commercial right now.

"Hi, I'm a Mac, and I just found this LOVELY WOODEN HORSE outside my front door! I think I'll bring it inside before someone steals it!"

Yeah, something like that! lol. Mac payback.<-Billy G.

The exploit which utilizes the ARDAgent [Apple Remote Desktop Agent] is really bad because it allows stuff like shell commands to run without notifying the user as it utilizes the setuid bit which is owned by root and allows all its child processes to run as root.

I cant stand the mac comercials Im suprised you do Davo. Not that they are not funny but what I cant stand is knowing people will believe that BS.

Take that trojan and eat it Mac. I'd agree with with the 2nd poster i wanna see a reverse Mac vs Pc commercial.

I like the Apple commercials that make fun of Windows Vista.  Because it's so true.

 I agree that they are humerous. Anything to get MS fired up imo is a good thing!

digitaldd:

The exploit which utilizes the ARDAgent [Apple Remote Desktop Agent] is really bad because it allows stuff like shell commands to run without notifying the user as it utilizes the setuid bit which is owned by root and allows all its child processes to run as root.

Pfft...any idiot knows that Haha, digital you sound like you may be a Unix/Linux buff hm?

FlyinBrian:

I cant stand the mac comercials Im suprised you do Davo. Not that they are not funny but what I cant stand is knowing people will believe that BS.

 

The thing with commercials and any advertising is that when you're not the market leader you typically target whoever is the market leader and (attempt to) make well played exaggerations.  Most "underdog" companies with a good advertising firm will do this (in turn, the market leader always ignores competitors in advertising, but that's besides the point).

The Mac commercials are obviously an exaggeration.  Taking them at face value doesn't work.  The face value of them really is BS (I'm a Mac user and I think so too).  At the same time, though, you get through the marketing and you see they are typically built on top of some real underlying truths or experiences, especially such that they appeal to the iPod-carrying J6P who HAS had issues with Windows, and maybe its entire platform.  Put simply, PC fans calling BS on the commercials are missing the bigger picture.  For example, from one of the commercials last year, they quoted Windows as having over 114,000 viruses.  We all know this is misleading crap because it's basically counting everything written since the beginning of time, which means we can exclude anything you're not going to find in the wild now.  Not to mention multiple variants in one family of viruses which you can also exclude.  However, the underlying point is that, as it is today, Windows still DOES have more viruses than Mac OS X does.  "114,000 viruses" is just a buzz phrase to catch attention -- to say anything else would be worthless and go unnoticed because it wouldn't attract attention.  Not attracting attention is bad advertising.  But anyway, I really doubt that most people believe the literal message of these commercials.  At least anyone who isn't retarded should know better cause this is how advertising works.

 

On topic, I do find it funny how people get all "Take that, Apple!" on news reports like these, because this happens so infrequently on Apple's platform and isn't really a big deal, but on the Windows side of things this wouldn't be a big announcement and would just be business as usual since it's not uncommon here.  Oh well, similar stuff happens on Mac news sites too   It's surprising how similar the two fanbases really can be.  Plus what's up with trojans?  That's all we get on this side of the fence.  A social engineering experiment -- not anything that exploits a hole in the OS, just a hole in the user's head.

Heya FlyinB, I personally think Macs make for pretty solid products right now. Not that I'm going to run out and buy one tomorrow but these days they offer some pretty solid product. And again, not that I agree with everything that's said in these commmercials, not by a long shot, but they're good commercials and the PC ecosystem should be thinking of ways to reach out to the mainstream crowd like Mac is as well.

ice91785:

digitaldd:

The exploit which utilizes the ARDAgent [Apple Remote Desktop Agent] is really bad because it allows stuff like shell commands to run without notifying the user as it utilizes the setuid bit which is owned by root and allows all its child processes to run as root.

Pfft...any idiot knows that Haha, digital you sound like you may be a Unix/Linux buff hm?

Sort of. Been working in tech support for a long time and have to support a lot of different OSes many of them unix based.