Apple Yanks Mac Virus Immunity Claims From Website

redletterdave writes "Apple quietly switched out a statement that claimed its Mac computers were completely immune to viruses with a less-forward statement: 'It's built to be safe.' The PR shift comes in the aftermath of the Flashback Trojan, which affected hundreds of thousands of Macs back in early April. From the article: 'Apple strives for perfection, but stating something is perfect when it isn't is ultimately bad for PR and company morale. Jobs used his reality distortion field to "rally the troops," so to speak, but "Mountain Lion" will ensure Apple can tout its closed, highly-secure operating system for the foreseeable future in a much more realistic sense. Just because a product isn't impervious to sickness doesn't mean it isn't "insanely great."'"

Re:Closed?

[CritterNYC]

The next Mac OS release will block any software not signed with an Apple-approved digital certificate by default. Advanced users can go into options and untick the option. This is seen as the next step to an iOS-style lockdown of the whole OS. The first being the release of the app store (with some preferential placements of apps installed via said app store). The next step, in Mountain Lion, making it so all developers have to go through apple, pay a yearly Apple developer fee, and be approved through some process before their software is allowed to be installed by default. Likely, a later release will require app store software only by default with an advanced option to disable that.

Progress

[onyxruby]

I consider this to significant progress on the part of Apple and they deserve to get credit. Much as Microsoft has their head buried in the sand for years before they started making changes, we should applaud Apple for taking the first step. I welcome Apple to world of reality, a world in which operating system have security flaws, require patches and get viruses.

Now that Apple is in at least some small way acknowledging the real world, let's see if they can clean up their act the way Microsoft did years ago. Admitting you have a problem is always the first step, now we can always hope that they will start to embrace industry standards for dealing with security issues. Perhaps someday their users will no longer also have their heads in the clouds about security issues?

Kind of funny thinking about it, a decade ago I never would have imagined citing Microsoft as a company that can be cited as cleaning up their act for security. /responsible for securing an environment that is %50 mac, so I'm not trolling.....

Re:Closed?

[Yvanhoe]

You know that "open" does not just mean "there is a CLI available", right ?

Re:"Windows viruses"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they made two claims. 1) They don't get PC (as in personal computer) viruses. and 2) That they are immune from Windows-based viruses. Claim #2 can be true if they are referring to viruses/vulnerabilities that affect the underlying Windows operating system - hence the Windows-based claim and could equally be claimed by Microsoft or Linux in the same manner. We already know there are cross-platform issues with Flash that affect both equally and led to Flash being banned from iOS devices. So claim #1 could never be true.