I have just got Apple's new Tiger upgrade to its Mac OS X, and I really like it. I love the widgets and all the other things added. I had a bit of a scare the other day when I heard that there is a terrible security hole in the new system? Is that true?
Name and address supplied
It is probably dangerous to assume that any operating system is completely safe. It is true that some are better than others - and Apple's OS certainly scores very high on security issues - but in the world of security, you never can be too safe.
The essential problem that can never be solved is the conflict between 'usability' and 'safety'. For a system to be safe, it must be difficult to get into; for it to be easily accessible to ordinary people, it must be very simple to use.
Microsoft is really the king of the latter. It is not that Microsoft makes things easy. Many would argue that, in fact, it accomplishes the exact opposite. But it certainly thinks it is making your life easier by asking you to reboot all the time or by doing things it thinks you want it to do for you.
This way, Microsoft inevitably opens some back door to hackers, and then the game is to find all the dangerous traps that have been inadvertently exposed. Some would argue that Microsoft can do little to rectify the situation. One of its biggest problems is the need to be backward compatible.
Microsoft's enemies love to point out its faults and, because there are so many of them (enemies as well as faults), it seems an endless game that will never play itself out.