Have you ever thought about how you’d deal with the aftermath of a data breach?
Would you be able to give your customers the bad news quickly, usefully and honestly?
We thought we’d dig into the recent malware infestation at Gentoo Linux – how it happened, how Gentoo responded, and how to avoid this sort of crisis in your own network.
We think Gentoo did a good job in a bad situation, and we can all learn something from that.
(Watch directly on YouTube if the video won’t play here.)
Puk
Hi Paul,
I’d be really curious to know why someone open minded and highly knowledgeable as you, promotes Apple products? I do get certain aspects in regard to security as well as design and am of course aware of dramatic shortcomings with Android’s update disaster compared to iphones. But isn’t the price one pays by choosing Apple – and I don’t mean the big bucks they charge – not also worth considering in an overall decision?
Paul Ducklin
You’ll need to say what you mean by “the price one pays by choosing Apple” – you seem to be insinuating something about Apple, but I don’t know what.
Puk
Hi Paul, as an ex avid Mac user am referring to walled garden mentality, locking people more and more into the Apple ecosystem, Apple as a representative of capitalism at its best (beyond the scope to explain in detail here), taking away the freedom of people in many ways (remember your own presentation about who is owing your iphone), and the list goes on….
Comfort is one thing, security another.
Of course, as Apple products (hard and software) derive from one company, it’s actually what you expect that it runs smoothly with hardly any glitch. Isn’t it comparing apples with oranges if one compares a Macbook with just a random laptop with a random Linux installed on it?. If such a comparison should have any value than the minimum is comparing a Macbook with one of the meanwhile available Laptops being specifically offered with one specific Linux distribution.
Regarding security: Maybe I got it wrong, do you wanna say, that MacOS per se is more secure than one of the well maintained Linux distributions? At least that’s the impression you give when talking about Linux malware while swinging around your shiny Macbook ;)
Paul Ducklin
I can build and run pretty much any software I want on my MacBook (including Linux itself if I so choose), so the wall around this “walled garden” to which you refer is a bit of an illusion.
For example, apps I use include: ffmpeg, GIMP, LibreOffice, GraphicsMagick, Inkscape and Wine.
I’d suggest that cautiously managed and regularly updated computers running Windows, Linux and macOS are about the same in cybersecurity terms, although macOS didn’t do itself any PR favours recently with that “blank root password” bug.
If I were to switch away from macOS I would probably go to OpenBSD rather than to Linux, but – as you say – Apple hardware with macOS “runs smoothly with hardly any glitch”.
I seriously considered a Dell XPS 15 recently – a couple of my friends have them – but the model I was after was quite a bit heavier, more expensive and nowhere near as nice to look at as my MacBook. And while they’re compiling new kernels and then fighting with everything that nearly but not quite works after rebooting…
…I am not :-)
Puk
Thanks, Paul, for taking the time to give a bit more insight. Highly appreciated!
I’m aware of that the result of technical evaluations are not necessarily going hand in hand with the socio-economic aspects I also consider when deciding on buying/using a product.
All the best and keep up the great work!