switching to a mac need advice on security issues

A

alpk

Registered
hey

I am thinking of switching and buying a mac, but there are a few things i would like to know. Does mac have the s ame problme with phone home as xp does? Also, is it possible to track and stop any connections from osx? I have seen that some parts of os x are open source, which parts are they?


thanks
 
So, is it possible to check what is ebing sent when anything accesses the web? Also can you use usual monitoring tools or does os x have a different networking structure in it?
 
Little Snitch will alert you to anything that goes out of your machine before it can go, and give you the option of letting it go through, stopping it.

You can look through here for monitoring tools
 
If you have no fear of the command line, tcpdump will show you every packet entering or leaving the computer. It's already installed.

Ethereal (free, open source), which can be most easily installed via fink (http://fink.sf.net), gives a nice GUI to analyze network captures, either saved tcpdump files, or it can do live captures.

Oh, as to the part of OS X that's open source: The actual OS - the part that deals with the hardware, accounts, etc. is all open source. The open source part is a complete BSD-based OS called Darwin (no links, shouldn't be hard to find info though). Anything that's pretty and graphical and Mac-like is the proprietary stuff.
 
thanks. Is the part of networking os on mac? I am used to using xp and would like to know if they use the same networking as xp.thanks
 
The networking protocols to access email and the internet are standards that even Microsoft has not been able to take over so at that level the networking from OS X and any version of Windows are the same. The only problem you might run into here is there are web sites that use Microsoft proprietary coding and are not compatible even with some versions of Windows and Internet Explorer.

If you are talking about networking to servers on your local area network then there are several different protocols that may be used, but in general OS X is capable of connecting with all of them including some that Windows cannot connect to. In other words your Mac can probably connect to Windows even if Windows cannot connect to the Mac. If you are talking about peer to peer file and printer sharing between PCs and Macs you may need help from third party applications such as those available from Thursby Software.

If you are talking about the implementation of the networking layers within the operating system then Windows is in a world all of its own. OS X on the other hand uses the same structure as Unix since it is Unix based.

If you are talking about setting up networking then OS X uses the same information as Windows, but where to go and set it up is different even in different versions of OS X.

It sounds as if you could use a good book to help you through the transition to the Mac. O'Reilly Press has some excellent resources in its Missing Manual series. David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition is widely recommended for new OS X users and his Switching To The Mac: The Missing Manual is a good one to help former Windoze users through the transition.
 
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