FreeBSD Shines While Apple Fails

"A critical bug recently discovered in FreeBSD, and the speed with which this bug was resolved, illustrates this rather well. If you use Apple's products in your business, be afraid; be very afraid.

"Here's how the sorry story unfolds. FreeBSD 8.0 was released last week, and the latest version of the UNIX-like OS was generally received with approval. FreeBSD enjoys a good reputation with its followers, and many OSes and products contain code based on or borrowed from the OS, including Juniper routers, and — ironically, as we shall see — Mac OS X.

"This latest release includes network stack virtualization using a new virtualization container, an improved USB stack, binary compatibility with Fedora 10 Linux, and an update to version 13 of the very wonderful ZFS. And, as they say, much, much more.

"So far so good. Until Monday morning, when researcher Nikolaos Rangos announced he discovered "an unbelievable [sic] simple local r00t bug in recent FreeBSD versions," along with some exploit code."

Complete Story

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