IP: more on U.S. Army enlists more Macs

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 20:07:19 -0500
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: Gene Spafford <spaf () cs purdue edu>
> Subject: Re: IP: U.S. Army enlists more Macs
>
> > Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 14:40:23 -0800
> > To: farber () cis upenn edu
> > From: Stewart Brand <sb () gbn org>
> >
> > > http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/09/19/army.html
>
> I'm glad to see this.   Back in 1996 & 1997,  I did some analyses of 
> web servers.   This was included in the form of a recommendation in 
> the book, "Web Security & Commerce," written with Simson Garfinkel. 
> On 269 you can see where we recommended that if security is a 
> concern, the Mac is our preferred platform.   There is no command 
> interpreter to run if you break through the WWW server.   By 
> default, there are only a few net-based services, and most of them 
> start off disabled or are easy to disable.  And MacOS runs fine off 
> a CD-ROM, so it is possible to build a set of pages and 
> configuration, burn them into a CD, and run with an immutable file 
> system.
>
> I haven't seen OS X yet, but I hope it doesn't contain lots of extra 
> "bells and whistles" that make it less securable.    Feature creep 
> introduces security problems, whether in MacOS, Windows NT, Linux, 
> or any other system.   Thankfully, MacOS is not yet at 60 million 
> lines so there is still hope for it!
>
> --spaf