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Apple Investigating 'MACDefender' Malware, Support Staff Barred From Assisting Customers
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Well if that's not a load of crap I don't know what is. I have exceptional tech skills, and I use a Mac because it just works. I beat my head against Windows BS all day long. When I come home I would rather just drive my Lexus than monkey around under the hood of a 65 Mustang.
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This is true. I've purchased Macs for clients specifically because they weren't savvy.
My wife (who happens to be more educated than I) isn't tech savvy at all, and could easily click "ok" or "download" or whatever just to get rid of an annoying pop-up. She's brilliant when it comes to things other than cars or computers.
This is true. I've purchased Macs for clients specifically because they weren't savvy.
My wife (who happens to be more educated than I) isn't tech savvy at all, and could easily click "ok" or "download" or whatever just to get rid of an annoying pop-up. She's brilliant when it comes to things other than cars or computers.
Are you still going on and on about Norton when I presented you with a dozen links months ago to prove otherwise?
NEVER allow anything to be installed YOU DIDN'T SPECIFICALLY REQUEST IN ADVANCE! EVAH!!!!!
I have this thing called "Software Update" that pops up from time to time telling me to install stuff - should I ignore that too?
Are you still going on and on about Norton when I presented you with a dozen links months ago to prove otherwise?
Don't you remember every single person with Norton/Symantec real world experience agreed with me?
I see so many "stupid" and "idiot" comments in this thread, it's ridiculous. Do any of you people recall a no flame/rude comment clause when you signed up? I don't care what you think of people and their IQs, but I know what I think when people feel the need to insult countless others. Is that what you need to feel better about yourself? Putting others down? I think the whole thread needs white-washed by the moderators. There is nothing friendly, helpful or informative about calling people names.
The Mac has always been about making tech easy for non-tech people. Calling people idiots because they are casual Mac users defeats the entire point of making the GUI easy to use for non-tech types. I find this thread shameful and makes me embarrassed to be a Mac user. I recommend the Mac to all kinds of people that don't like Windows computers because they're a PITA. I'm sure they'd love to stop by here and be called idiots because they don't understand phishing and trojans. And I can tell you there are a LOT of people that can rebuild a car from top to bottom or service multi-million dollar machines as electronic technicians that don't know their way around computers (i.e. software). They are not "stupid". They simply are ignorant about that particular area of technology. We can't all know everything about everything. Some of you should ask yourselves just how much you know about every appliance, heating and cooling system and vehicle you own.
The Mac has always been about making tech easy for non-tech people. Calling people idiots because they are casual Mac users defeats the entire point of making the GUI easy to use for non-tech types. I find this thread shameful and makes me embarrassed to be a Mac user. I recommend the Mac to all kinds of people that don't like Windows computers because they're a PITA. I'm sure they'd love to stop by here and be called idiots because they don't understand phishing and trojans. And I can tell you there are a LOT of people that can rebuild a car from top to bottom or service multi-million dollar machines as electronic technicians that don't know their way around computers (i.e. software). They are not "stupid". They simply are ignorant about that particular area of technology. We can't all know everything about everything. Some of you should ask yourselves just how much you know about every appliance, heating and cooling system and vehicle you own.
I completely agree. Such comments are uncalled for and really speak more to the maturity (or lack therof) of those posting such comments.
Lol...Any Windows user knows tons more about how computers work than the average Mac user.
If anything, the people switching from Windows to Macs are raising the intellectual level of the user base.
Don't you remember every single person with Norton/Symantec real world experience agreed with me?
And not one of you could list a single source to back up your claims? I remember.
It's ridiculous comments like both of these that offer nothing of value to this thread. To claim that you can determine the knowledge, intelligence or technical experience of anyone based on the OS they choose to use is to display a monumental lack of reasoning and understanding. You can't determine the "intellectual level" of any user base of any OS.
This issue is probably being mostly reported by recent switchers. Windows people can't understand that Mac's really don't need virus protection and when they see a bogus virus warning, they take the bait and install the program.
You are probably being a smart-asss, but yeah... actually you should ignore the update notice. I have mine set to manual update and run it only when I think an update will help my system and NOT conflict with my other software. I could care less about having a current OS. I'm more concerning that my primary applications run great and don't get buggy after running updates.
I have this thing called "Software Update" that pops up from time to time telling me to install stuff - should I ignore that too?
You are probably being a smart-asss, but yeah... actually you should ignore the update notice. I have mine set to manual update and run it only when I think an update will help my system and NOT conflict with my other software. I could care less about having a current OS. I'm more concerning that my primary applications run great and don't get buggy after running updates.
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Because real experience was the backup. Sorry but reviews on websites mean literally nothing. Until you work with it deployed into a company with 5000+ computers you'll never realize what trash it is.
Basically the "evidence" you pointed to was reviews by people who used it for a week or two. What everyone in the forum, me included were telling you is that we have YEARS of experience in using it and can easily tell you how worthless it is. From false positives, to real missed viruses, to it accidentally deleting its own files (yes, that used to be an issue) and to bogging down each computer it ran on, there are plenty of reasons to hate Symantec.
By reading reviews like the ones you posted you are trusting someone with little to no experience with the software. If I was going to re-do a 3D animation pipeline for example for one of our departments the last thing I would do is go to a magazine or review site and look what ratings some editor gave for various pieces of software, they have no experience with it. Instead I would go straight to the artists using the tools for a long time and find out the ins and outs of it from them since they are the ones with real world experience.
If you want to use Symantec, thats your choice but just like in the other thread I can't let you recommend it to people without letting them know how it really is, and all of the others felt the same way.
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Totally agreed, this is the reason there are so many Apple "haters" out there - though I suspect the elitist jerks prefer it that way so they can feel like the knowledgeable few.
At the end of the day the Mac simplicity and ease of use attracts quite a few of the non-techy crowd precisely for those reasons, it doesn't mean they are necessarily computer literate. Many Apple owners are also successful wealthier people to be considering a Mac in the first place - just because they aren't spending all day looking through their milk-bottle glasses at the inner workings don't presume you are superior or more intelligent.
My father, and a few people where I work have installed viruses in the past (on Windows PC's) by clicking on those "You have a virus, click here to fix it!" pop-ups, it's not because they're stupid, they just didn't know better and presumed the computer was helping them.
I hope these smug guys feel just as intellectual when they have to take their broken cars to illiterate mechanics to be fixed, or when a fireman who's never touched a computer is carrying their enfeebled (aside from strong typing fingers) frame down from the house they've set fire to, probably by going nuts overclocking their processors. At the end of the day, you're using a computer, you're probably not saving the world or even achieving anything in the real world (and no, you're not Neo) - get over yourselves.
But would she type in the administrator password when asked? MacDefender can download and start an installer, but the installer can't do anything until the user types in an administrator password. Here is the order in which things have to go wrong for you to actually have malware installed:
First, you download the malware itself or an installer package. The malware producer can easily achieve this. On my companies website there are links like "click here to download this Macintosh software"; we could easily change it to a link "click here if you don't want the software" and download it when you click ther. There may be warnings that you click away.
If it is malware, it is now in your "Downloads" folder; it won't do anything unless you start it (and click another warning away). If it is an installer package for the Apple Installer, then the Apple Installer will open it. The malware producer can't use installer packages for any other installer.
If the Apple Installer opens the package, it will ask you for an administrator password. There is no way around that. No administrator password, no install. If you give the administrator password, the software can do what it likes.
Now the marketing guys in our company always ask us to change our downloads so that the user can just click on a link and everything is downloaded and installed automatically, with no further work for the user and no password and nothing, which is a lot more user friendly, and we always tell them we can't, and when the marketing guys don't want to take "no" for an answer we tell them if _we_ could do what they are asking us to do, then _any malware producer_ could do it as well, and in that case they should better throw their MacBooks into the nearest dustbin. At that point they usually understand and don't ask again for the next twelve months.
Where I am, all the Windows users come to the only Macintosh user for help with their Windows problems. Among software developers that I know (and they know more about how computers work than anyone else), more than half use a Macintosh at home. Among software testers I talked to, the percentage is a bit lower, but getting close to fifty percent as well. There it seems to be an age thing; at some point in your life beating your computer into submission instead of just using it stops being fun.
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Not good.
The normal user should be free of all these issues. One cannot call a normal person an idiot as every one is not aware of these things.
As I can see, one can easily get MACDefender through ads, etc. There's nothing unsafe for a person to click on these ads although one must research whether MACDefender is a software or some kind of malware.
But again, there's two things:
1. What is malware? The user should know but its not necessary that they know.
2. MACDefender doesn't sound fishy imo; so one would install it without any questions.
I think there should be some kind of extra protection in OS X to fight against such malware/spyware crap.
It's not the users fault for the most part as I have understood that you can easily get this malware without violating any safe practices.
The normal user should be free of all these issues. One cannot call a normal person an idiot as every one is not aware of these things.
As I can see, one can easily get MACDefender through ads, etc. There's nothing unsafe for a person to click on these ads although one must research whether MACDefender is a software or some kind of malware.
But again, there's two things:
1. What is malware? The user should know but its not necessary that they know.
2. MACDefender doesn't sound fishy imo; so one would install it without any questions.
I think there should be some kind of extra protection in OS X to fight against such malware/spyware crap.
It's not the users fault for the most part as I have understood that you can easily get this malware without violating any safe practices.
I noticed that you used the word "crap" in 3 of the 1st 5 sentences. Are you trying to earn the fanboy lingo award.
So let me understand this, you are calling people "stupid folks" and "dumb" and then somehow blaming the x86 processor for the increased level of OS X Malware?
In the words of your idol "Please educate yourself".....
I don't know where you get those stats from. But as far as I understand, the normal user with the same windows attitude is coming to the mac.
Macs were contemporarily build for techies/developers and other experts in diverse fields. The recent venture in the Mac industry has made normal people switch to the Mac making the ratio of knowledge among mac users and windows users much balanced.
The perception of 'sheeps' using the mac is just ridiculous as most of the people who use mac have something to do with it rather than just buying a machine for normal tasks. Again, this was the attitude sometime back but as I said, normal people are buying macs now and its all being balanced now.
On another note, this is a very stupid discussion.
Knowing how to maintain an inherently broken and flawed system (Windows) when there are other - often better - options available isn't knowledge or savvy. It's masochism.
Knowing how to "use" computers in general is also no signifier of intellect. Some of the most brilliant litigators I used to work with weren't very computer-literate.
LTD, Windows isn't a "flawed system". It has it's strengths and weaknesses just like any other platform. When it comes to security, it's important to be prudent of how you maintain and what you install on ANY platform - be it Windows, OS X, Linux, or one of the UNIX work-a-likes.
Windows is not a flawed system.
I have to ask, how does it feel to have an average of -8 for your post history? Your posts are so laughably inaccurate and full of BS. You are the most useless & clueless person on this forum when it comes to valid and helpful information.
It's surprising to me just how many Mac programs DO ask for your password. Every time you software update, every time you update Adobe Flash, every time you update perian (twice!) and several others I can't confirm offhand. It certainly happens more often than some people seem to think and any of that could confuse a non-tech user. Hell, I'm wondering half the time what would happen if Adobe Flash's site got hacked and replaced with a trojan/backdoor version of Flash (that functions but has hidden malware spying on keystrokes, etc. in it) because you have to give it your password to update it and you cannot tell at a glance if it were hacked somehow (Microsoft uses signed drivers, etc. to make sure you don't have some hacked driver in the field that's really screwing your computer up; I don't see anything like that on the Mac, but then there aren't a lot of 3rd party drivers floating around either).
Being an expert in rocket science doesn't make you automatically an expert in computer operating systems. And I don't buy the argument in the first place anyway. Having money does not connotate knowledge or competency; many rich people are born rich to rich parents. The Mac had a 'yuppie' reputation for being the computer for the well-off (given its price premium over other computers 'for the rest of us'). When I had an Amiga, the other common perception (in addition to the yuppie one) was that "Macs were for the computer illiterate" (no access to any command line or inner structures; the whole interface was dumbed down to a full/basic GUI; I still don't like OS9 for that reason). We figured you had to pay more to get an easier to use interface, but Macs weren't all out of a normal person's price range. My Amiga 3000 wasn't exactly cheap. I could have gotten a lower level Mac instead. I didn't WANT a Mac back then. I didn't like them at all (definitely weren't a gaming machine back then either whereas the Amiga had the best games for the first 5-6 years or so of its life on top of a nice CLI/GUI combo. Dos was still the preferred OS for gaming or graphics intensive apps on the PC and it wasn't even as functional as a stand-alone Unix CLI). OSX is Unix-based, though and therefore whether Steve Jobs likes it or not, you CAN do a lot of low-level things and use a more powerful shell interface if you like. It's only then that I even considered a Mac.
Again, I think that's a pretty arrogant assumption. What do most Mac users 'do' on here, pray-tell? I have a MBP for music composition (long after the PowerMac, which I bought used just to play with OSX), but I still spend most of my time surfing/e-mail like I would on any other computer regardless of the OS. Modern Macs are just PCs anyway. Other than EFI, there is NOTHING different about them. The fact I'm typing in 10.6.7 OSX on a Dell Netbook proves that (BTW, that Dell crashes FAR LESS than my MBP; in fact it's NEVER locked up; I cannot say that about any of my Apple branded Macs. Both my MBP and PowerMac have had their share of freezes and kernel panics. Both of them sometimes don't wake from sleep properly; this netbook wakes from sleep perfectly every time for months and months on end)
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I don't know what you were trying to argue on but it seems you have misunderstood or misinterpreted my post.
What I meant was that 'Macs' were only meant for the people had some serious work to do; be it desktop publishing [still work] or low level scripting or any other work. This can be attributed to macs being overly expensive during that era and people just couldn't afford them.
Maybe the rich were the ones buying it [obviously], but they had their utility.
The point that I'm trying to emphasize is that in the recent times, macs have gone cheaper and more people are able to afford/experiment them.
Instead of the pro-work, people use macs for casual tasks which wasn't the case before.
But seriously, why would you even throw the following arguments in the conversation:
On another note, as I said people use macs for almost everything these days unlike in the past.
I just don't understand what you were trying to press-on in your previous comment?