eWeek says "Apple's Switch to Intel Could Allow OS X Exploits"

[pmeunier at cerias.purdue.edu (Pascal Meunier)]

On 1/27/06 12:06 PM, "Crispin Cowan" <crispin at novell.com> wrote:

> However, Mac OS X (and Linux and *BSD) still hold the major advantage
> over Windows that it is uncommon to run the mail client as
> root/administrator, so the infection rate will remain much lower than on
> Windows. Only when attackers have an actual exploit for the Mac/*NIX can
> they 0wn the machine. On Windows, they just need a good line and a user
> dumb enough to click on the attachment.


Not to mention other design issues such as the search path for dlls and
executables being different in Windows, and exhibiting complex behavior that
varies from update to update, with poor documentation of those changes (or
ignorance on my part of where they are documented, as they are not easily
found with Google).  A pet peeve of mine is how the recommendation to not
have "." in your PATH in UNIX is impossible to translate for the Windows
world.  The search path for executables (at the command line prompt, anyway)
in Windows *always* includes the current directory (the search path for dlls
can be made to exclude the current directory with a special call with a NULL
parameter).  I noticed a change for the worst just recently: now the current
directory is searched before any directory in the PATH environment variable,
even if PATH contains ";." as the last item (it used to be that you could
make the current directory searched last by having ";." as the last item in
the PATH).

Pascal