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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

Mac OSX is inferior from a security standpoint, but enjoys herd immunity so the actual risk of infection is lower.

Herd immunity? That's a pretty bad metaphor. There is not "safety in numbers" on the Mac. Safety comes from their lack of numbers. Unless you meant to imply that Macs are like the kids at school whose dipshit parents don't vaccinate them.

Actually, that's not what herd immunity means. Herd immunity is based on the concept that, if a large enough subset of the population is protected from infection, then others in the population are inherently more protected due to lower transmission rates.

For herd immunity to apply in this case, we'd be assuming that OS X users are more likely to take proper measures to ensure that their system is not compromised (which may or may not be the case).

If Windows computers make up a majority of the market, then the transmission rate for viruses that target only OS X is low. Therefore, you could argue that computers collectively enjoy herd immunity versus OS X viruses, even if machines running OS X individually have weaker security than average.

Herd immunity doesn't mean "safety in numbers". It means insulation from transmission vectors because the rest of the herd is immune from diseases that might infect you. An isolated OSX machine surrounded by Windows machines in a network is relatively isolated from virus transmission vectors.

Then again, Jeff Goldblum was able to write a virus on his Mac that he used to infect the alien mothership, so maybe they're not so secure after all...

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