Last month’s cluster of “Mac Defender” malware flareups felt like a flashback to 2001, with the role of Microsoft being played by Apple. The malware, which took advantage of poisoned Google images search results to trick users into installing fake anti-virus software, first appeared in variants that required an administrator password for installation.

Soon, though, later versions appeared that didn’t require a password for installation, provided that the user being fooled was running with administrator rights–the default for the first user account set up on a Mac.

While much is made of how the root account is disabled by default on OS X, administrator accounts on today’s OS X are less tightly controlled than administrator accounts on Windows 7–a result of the decade that Microsoft spent dealing with security issues, delaying its efforts building a strong successor to XP.

However, the big difference between Apple 2011 and Microsoft 2001 is that the way forward for Apple needn’t involve bolting on potentially confusing new security layers to its desktop OS. Instead, Apple has a second, and significantly more secure platform to offer its users: iOS.

Where OS X relies on a fairly standard Unix permissions structure based on a admin/user divide that home and corporate users alike find challenging or annoying to abide by, iOS provides a mix of application control, isolation, and resource constraint that’s proving both palatable and secure.

Rather than figure out a way to enable every user to fiddle with their machines like a hobbyist while preserving the security and stability of a well-managed desktop, Apple’s managed to convince its mobile users that less can be more. Smartphones, which we got to know as a constrained and underperforming platform for computing, offered an apt proving ground for these ideas.

A retirement party for OS X may still be a little way off, but given the growth of iOS, and the iOS-ward course that Apple has charted for Lion, there’s no way that Apple’s primary OS of 2021 will as closely resemble OS X as Windows 7 does XP.

rPath X6 expands on the company’s software appliance assembly and deployment ambitions with powerful configuration management capabilities and a spruced-up user interface that’s much improved compared with the Version 5.2 release that eWEEK Labs tested in 2009. Also much improved is the product’s support for deploying software images to VMware, EC2 and other virtualization hosts. In our tests of rPath X6, we had no trouble assembling and deploying CentOS-based virtual appliances, but found the product’s configuration management processes more difficult to master, and the product documentation for these tasks sparser than I’d have liked.

For a look at rPath X6 in action, check out the gallery below, and be sure to read our full review here.

This week, Microsoft announced that it would support CentOS as a guest operating system on Hyper-V, citing CentOS support as the number one interoperability requirement among Web hosting providers weighting whether to consolidate their system virtualization on Microsoft’s hypervisor.

When I read the news, my thoughts turned immediately to Red Hat and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system on which CentOS is directly based. (more…)

I’ve just returned from Atlanta, where Cameron and I attended a Microsoft Server and Tools reviewer workshop packed with cool product presentations, such as those for Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing services, and for the LightSwitch non-developer development platform.

However, I found my my enthusiasm for Azure and for LightSwitch somewhat stunted upon finding that neither the Azure admin console nor the apps built with LightSwitch will work with my Ubuntu computers. (more…)

This week at its Google I/O conference, the Web giant announced that Chrome OS, its long-awaited, “nothing but the Web” operating system, will soon be available for purchase, powering a pair of Samsung and Acer “Chromebooks.”

My overall take on ChromeOS hasn’t much changed since early developer builds of the platform first turned up nearly two years ago: I’m a fan of open platforms, and the Web is an open platform. An operating system centered on the Web stands to advance the state of the platform, which will benefit us all, so, hooray for ChromeOS.

Yesterday I loaded up a ChromeOS build from onto a Dell netbook, a Latitude 2120 with a dual-core Atom processor, and took Google’s latest bits for a spin. I must say, when I wrote about ChromeOS in July of 2009, I expected Google’s endeavor to have been further along than its is now. After all, the biggest hurdle for the platform remains in place… (more…)

Late last month, The Attachmate Group completed its acquisition of Novell. Moving forward, Novell and SUSE Linux will operate, alongside NetIQ and Attachmate, as four separate business units—a reorganization that unravels the 2003 SUSE acquisition that had established Novell as a Linux and open source player.

In the years following its SUSE pickup, Novell trumpeted its new, open source direction so loudly that it’s tough to imagine exactly what a SUSE-free Novell will look like moving forward. (more…)